// Latest Posts

Implicit Cognition at the Aristotelian Society

Last month I gave a talk at the Aristotelian Society, in which I asked ‘What do we want from a model of implicit cognition?’ Here’s the abstract for the paper: In this paper, I set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition. I present test cases and suggest that, when considered in light …

Start The Week

In Citizen, An American Lyric, the poet Claudia Rankine charts the forms of micro- and macro-aggression that racism takes in the US, and the UK. I participated in a panel on race and bias with Rankine, with poet Amir Darwish, and historian Catherine Fletcher, on this week’s Start the Week, BBC Radio 4. You can …

Minorities and Philosophy: Leeds Conference on Implicit Bias

Coming up this week: this excellent looking conference, on Implicit Bias, organised by the Leeds ‘Minorities and Philosophy’ Chapter. Check out the great program here.

Implicit Bias and Analyses of Discrimination

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at Humboldt University, Berlin, on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s recent book on discrimination: Born Free and Equal? A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination. The book offers an analysis of the notion of discrimination, and tackles some questions in which the concept is implicated (the relationship …

Bias mitigation

On Friday I gave a talk on cognitive and implicit biases, to a group of employment tribunal judges. The judges were a great audience, far younger, more receptive and more diverse than my own prejudices had led me to expect, and I enjoyed the opportunity to think about the area of cognitive bias, and how …

Pilot study on Blame

We are running a short pilot study on the experience of blame. Please take part in our survey which only takes 5-10 minutes to complete. Everyone who takes part has a chance of winning a £50 gift voucher to be spent at your choice of online retailer! The link to take part is below: https://sheffieldpsychology.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8J2JCkRR5O2fBHL …

The Implicit Mind

Myself, Tom and Robin recently had the opportunity to attend this event on The Implicit Mind, at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. It was a great forum for scholars working on a range of topics to do with implicit cognition to make progress in thinking about the structure of implicit cognition. One of …

Implicit Race Bias and the Anatomy of Institutional Racism

I recently had the opportunity to speak at an event organised by The Monitoring Group and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, on Police Corruption, Spying, Racism and Accountability. At this conference, a range of participants from activist groups, academia, legal teams and victims of injustice spoke – often powerfully and movingly – on …

Gender bias in sacrificing decisions

Imagine that you are the driver of a train full of passengers rushing through a tunnel. You are quickly approaching the end of the tunnel, but what is that? Another train is blocking the track and you realize with horror that a collision will lead to a disaster involving the death of many passengers. You …

Persuasive blame and third party blame

. A new paper proposes a comprehensive psychological theory of blame (Malle, Guglielmo & Monroe, 2014). The heart of it is what they call a Path Model of Blame, which focusses on the processes by which a cognitive agent comes to identify that someone is to blame (in Malle et al’s formulation, blame is always …