Doctoral Student
University of Toronto
How do we form, revise, and talk about our beliefs? How do we infer others’ beliefs? How do biases shape how we seek, remember, and share information across the lifespan? Are there cross-cultural differences in the development of these abilities? These questions constitute the focus of my research interests, whose overarching theme is the development of human social learning and reasoning.
In this line of research, I aim to understand how individuals become biased learners and reasoners. I am particularly interested in self-serving biases such as confirmation/myside bias. I examine the presence and extent of these biases across different stages of reasoning (information seeking, memory, information sharing) across the lifespan. I also examine how individuals' goals (e.g., learning versus persuading others) shape these biases. Recently, I have also been conducting research on how group norms shape individuals' willingness to revise their beliefs in light of new evidence.
Watch my video here: Behind the research: Myside Bias
In this line of research, I examine how children and adults make inferences about others’ unobservable mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) in ambiguous situations. For example, others’ testimony is often ambiguous, requiring us to infer what they truly think, believe, or want based on contextual cues such as prior interactions. In some cases, what people say differs from what they truly want; in these situations, we must consider social cues such as alignment with their group, group pressure, and the perceived social costs of actions when inferring true preferences. I investigate the development of these types of inferences.
This line of work focuses on whether and how speakers of different languages differ in how they evaluate others' testimony, revise their beliefs, and engage in argumentation with others. For example, in Turkish, it is grammatically obligatory to express how information was acquired (whether the speaker is reporting direct observation or hearsay), while it is not obligatory in English. I investigate whether these types of linguistic cues facilitate young children’s reasoning in evaluating and talking about the reliability of testimony, and revising beliefs.