Working papers
People regulate each other’s emotion regulation.
Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.P. Preprint
People will criticize others for experiencing suffering when they think that the sufferer can choose to stop feeling upset. People think others can choose to stop being upset when they are irrationally upset.
In press/Recent papers
The case for heterogeneity in metacognitive appraisals of biased beliefs.
Cusimano, C. (2024). Personality and Social Psychology Review
People do not always hold beliefs under an “illusion of objectivity”. They can know when they weigh evidence partially and can know when they believe something without evidence. These facts about metacognition provide insight into people’s desire and capacity to regulate their beliefs.
Psychological freedom, rationality, and the naive theory of reasoning.
Cusimano, C., Zorrilla, N., Danks, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2024). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(3), 837-863.
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Link
People possess a naive theory of reasoning. They draw on this naive theory when judging other’s control over their beliefs, desires, intentions, and intentional behavior. This theory explains common intuitions about coercion, exploitation, and situational necessity.
This work appeared first as a conference paper at CogSci 2021.
A short (and fun!) video, presented at CogSci 2021, introducing the first version of this work.
Published papers
Lay standards for reasoning predict people’s acceptance of suspect claims.
A short review of recent work on people’s “lay ethics of belief”.
People recognize and condone their own morally motivated reasoning.
People engage in morally motivated reasoning, are aware that their current beliefs are the product of motivated reasoning, and approve of their reasoning (and their beliefs) anyway.
Select news coverage:
Psychology Today
Mental states and control-based theories of responsibility.
Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.P. (2022). In T. Nadelhoffer & A. Monroe (eds). Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility. Preprint
Mental states have represented the strongest challenge to control-based theories of moral responsibility. But the data show that people hold others responsible for mental states in a way that vindicates control theories.
Reconciling scientific and commonsense values to improve reasoning.
Cusimano, C., & Lombrozo, T. (2021). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25, 937-949.
PDF
We coordinate • cognitive models of biased reasoning, • normative theories of belief formation, and • the lay ethics of belief to identify new ways to improve everyday reasoning.
Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief.
Cusimano, C., & Lombrozo, T. (2021). Cognition, 209, 104513. PDF Data and Code
When do people think others should engage in motivated reasoning? When it confers moral benefits.
This work appeared first as a conference paper at CogSci 2020.
A short video, presented at CogSci 2020, introducing the work.
People judge others to have more voluntary control over beliefs than they themselves do.
Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.P. (2020). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119, 999-1029. PDF Preprint Data and Code
Thinking about the evidence we have for our beliefs makes us think we can’t choose to believe otherwise. We don’t think about other people’s evidence, so we think they can control their beliefs.
Select news coverage:
PsyPost,
Psychology Today
Lay beliefs about the controllability of everyday mental states.
Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.P. (2019). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148, 1701-1732. PDF Data and Code
Scholars tend to think that mental states are not controllable. They have wrongly assumed lay people think the same thing. Control looks like the basis for attributions of mental state responsibliity.
This work appeared first as a conference paper at CogSci 2017.
Is opposition to genetically modified food “morally absolutist”? A consequence-based perspective.
Royzman, E., Cusimano, C., Metas, S., & Leeman, R. F. (2019). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1-23. PDF
The best evidence that people are moral absolutists about GMFs is based on a question that people do not understand. When you correct this misunderstanding, people are not moral absolutists.
Measurement is the core disgust problem: Response to Inbar and Scott (2018).
Cusimano, C., Royzman, E., Leeman, R. F., & Metas, S. (2018). Judgment and Decision Making, 13(6), 639-651. PDF Data
In order to theorize correctly about disgust and moral judgment, you have to correctly measure disgust.
What lies beneath? Fear vs. disgust as affective predictors of absolutist opposition to genetically modified food and other new technologies.
Royzman, E., Cusimano, C., & Leeman, R. F. (2017). Judgment and Decision Making, 12(5), 466-480. PDF Data
Studies associating disgust and GMF opposition are actually associating feelings of "creepiness" and GMF opposition.
Judgment before emotion: People access moral judgments faster than affective states.
Cusimano, C.,Thapa Magar, S., & Malle, B.F. (2017). Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. PDF
Response time evidence that moral emotions are a product of moral judgment, not the other way around.
Moral Judgments of Human vs. Robot Agents.
Voiklis, J., Kim, B., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. (2016, August). IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2016). PDF
People rely on the same conceptual toolkit to evaluate humans and robots.
In Search of Triggering Conditions for Spontaneous Visual Perspective Taking.
Zhao, X., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. F. (2015). Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. PDF
People are more likely to take another’s visual perspective after that person has performed an intentional action.
Sacrifice one for the good of many? People apply different moral norms to human and robot agents.
Malle, B. F., Scheutz, M., Voiklis, J., Arnold, T., & Cusimano, C. (2015). HRI’15: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual 2015 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. PDF
People want robots to be more utilitarian than they want humans to be.
Do people spontaneously take a robot’s visual perspective?
Zhao, X., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. F. (2015). HRI’15: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual 2015 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. PDF
Seems so.
A social-conceptual map of moral criticism.
Voiklis, J., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. F. (2014). Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. PDF
Different blame words pick out different functions of blame. Mostly, blame as something people do to regulate others’ behavior.