Tania Lombrozo
Tania Lombrozo is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Lombrozo directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab, where she and her students study aspects of human cognition at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including the drive to explain and its relationship to understanding, various aspects of causal and moral reasoning and all kinds of learning.
Lombrozo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER award, a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformational Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science. She received bachelors degrees in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. Lombrozo also blogs for Psychology Today.
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Understanding the authority of science means, when it comes to factual claims, intuitions and gut feelings won't cut it — whichever side of the political aisle they come from, says Tania Lombrozo.
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As many families prepare for a visit from Santa, and some face questions about the jolly old man in the red suit, a new study looks at how children react to surprising claims, says Tania Lombrozo.
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Do people like Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins impact public opinion on how science and religion relate? Tania Lombrozo considers a study on the influence of big-name scientists on the debate.
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Science will one day explain visual perception and memory loss. But will it also explain romantic love and morality? Tania Lombrozo considers people's beliefs about what science can and can't explain.
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Young children have an easier time exporting what they learn from a fictional storybook to the real world when the storybook is realistic, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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Randomized controlled trials are a gold standard for good reason, but the notion of causation established here departs from the way we often use causal language, says blogger Tania Lombrozo.
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How do societal inequalities arise and persist? Tania Lombrozo interviews philosopher Ron Mallon about "accumulation mechanisms": the processes that explain how small biases can have big effects.
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Shaping technology to some form of learning could depart pretty radically from the more familiar aim of shaping technology to the way we are now, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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A new paper suggests that to declare something a mystery isn't just a confession of ignorance: Some of the time, you can learn something important from it, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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Double-masked jargon is so sneaky that I've only managed to uncover a few examples, says blogger Tania Lombrozo; it's real and, in some cases, it presents a barrier to effective science communication.