CORY JANE CLARK

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Social Cognition, Judgment & Decision Making, Bias, Moral & Political Psychology, Metascience

I am a behavioral scientist interested in how social motivations influence human judgment and empirical beliefs. Human cognition evolved to help us avoid ostracism and gain social status (among other things). We thus reason in ways that help us persuade others of our moral righteousness and of our value and commitment to our social groups. Although humans care about truth and accuracy, human cognition is also biased toward achieving these social goals.

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In the moral domain, I have found that belief in free will is at least partially motivated by desires to blame and punish others. Asserting the existence of human free will and moral responsibility allows people to justify punishment to observers and thus reduce risks of retaliation.

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In the political domain, I have found that people hold double standards in their evaluations of information and behavior. Both liberals and conservatives are relatively credulous toward information that supports their ideological agenda and skeptical and censorious of information that challenges it. And both are relatively forgiving of the moral failings of in-group members compared to those of outgroup members. Although scholars continue to debate differences in epistemic virtues on the left and right, my research suggests both liberals and conservatives are similarly vulnerable to such in-group biases. In my view, this is to be expected given the evolutionary pressures for social status and evolutionary costs of ostracism.

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I am also interested in motivated cognition in evaluations of science and among scientists. Scientists are humans after all, and it would be quite surprising if they were not vulnerable to similar biases, errors, and motivations as other people. My ongoing work has found that scientists who believe that unpopular conclusions are empirically true are particularly likely to self-censor their beliefs and particularly scared of peer ostracism and punishment. This suggests that professional discourse (and perceived scientific consensus) surrounding controversial conclusions is systematically biased toward the rejection of socially undesirable empirical conclusions.

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On the more applied side, I am interested in finding ways of de-biasing science and scientists and expediting the truth discovery process. Over the past three years, I (along with Professor Philip Tetlock) have been participating in and advocating for adversarial collaborations, a methodological procedure in which disagreeing scholars mutually design research procedures to test their competing hypotheses. This process can facilitate more rigorous science because both proponents and opponents must agree to fair and unbiased tests. Learn more about our initiative here.

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You can read most of my publications here.