In the CCR Lab, we investigate how people's beliefs influence the way they reason and make decisions. We have investigated this question in relation to causal reasoning and categorization, and have expanded this work to explore how experts and laypeople make decisions about health categories. Below is a sampling of research projects currently ongoing in the lab.
Beliefs about category essences
What makes something a member of a category? People act as if categories in the world possess something referred to as an essence, a special causal trait that creates the features of the category and must be possessed for something to be a member of that category (e.g., Ahn, Taylor, Kato, Marsh, & Bloom, 2013). We have explored people's beliefs in essences in a series of studies that look to define the boundaries of essentialism. For example:
- Does becoming an expert in categorizing members of a given category change beliefs related to essences in that category? For example, while laypeople believe medical disorder categories have essences, do physicians also believe in such defining essences? (Collaborator: Jessica Cooper)
- Does being a member of a category reduce your beliefs that the category has an essence? (Collaborator: Diana Hooten)
- Do beliefs about whether a category has an essence predict willingness to interact with members of that category? (Collaborator: Lindzi Shanks)
The influence of ambivalence on impressions of expert categorizers
In everyday life we ask experts to make decisions for us that we can not ourselves make. Even experts may have difficulty in making some categorization decisions. We have explored how people react to experts expressing ambivalence in a categorization task. We have found that people form extremely negative impressions of ambivalent experts within the health domain (Marsh & Rothman, 2013). This finding poses many open questions, such as:
- What is the mechanism by which ambivalence lowers people's impressions of experts?
- Would such impressions be equally negative for experts outside the health domain?
Decision-making in context
Mental health symptoms present in the rich context of a person's life. We have explored how experts and laypeople are influenced by this contextual information when determining if someone is experiencing a mental illness. Both experts (De Los Reyes & Marsh, 2011) and laypeople (Marsh, De Los Reyes, & Wallerstein, under review) are greatly influenced by such information. We are interested in further exploring:
- How can the influence of context be minimized in order to provide more accurate diagnoses? (Collaborator: Andres De Los Reyes)
- How does the context surrounding diagnosis influence other reasoning elements, such as memory for information relevant to categorization?