Working papers
Feeling entitled: The roles of hard work and achievement.
Cusimano, C., & Kim, J., & Wong, J. Email for draft
People think they deserve rewards based on how well they do, not based on how hard they work.
People regulate each other’s emotion regulation.
Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.P. Preprint
People will criticize others for suffering when they think that the sufferer can choose to stop feeling upset. People think others can choose to stop feeling upset when they are irrationally upset.
Newest Published Work
The case for heterogeneity in metacognitive appraisals of biased beliefs.
People do not always reason under an “illusion of objectivity”. They sometimes know when they weigh evidence partially, and they sometimes know when they believe something without evidence. Heterogeneity in metacognition provides 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. People draw on this naive theory when attributing control over beliefs, desires, intentions, and intentional behavior. This paper (also) explains common intuitions about coercion, exploitation, and situational necessity.
This short article in Nautilus describes the key ideas.
This short (and fun!) video (presented at CogSci 2021) describes an early study from this project.
People’s judgments of humans and robots in a classic moral dilemma
Malle, B.F., Scheutz, M., Cusimano, C., Komatsu, T., Voiklis, J., Thapa, S., Aladia, S. (In press). Cognition. PDF
People apply the same norms to humans and robots, but blame them differently. Probably because people empathize with people but not robots.
This paper supersedes our 2015 paper, which we now think came to the wrong conclusion.
Publications
Lay standards for reasoning predict people’s acceptance of suspect claims.
Stahl, T., & Cusimano, C. (2023). Current Opinions in Psychology, 55, 101727. PDF
A short review of recent work on people’s “lay ethics of belief”.
People recognize and condone their own morally motivated reasoning.
Cusimano, C., & Lombrozo, T. (2023). Cognition, 234, 105379. PDF
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.
Psychology Today provides an accessible summary.
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. PDF
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.
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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
When do people think others should engage in motivated reasoning? When it confers moral benefits.
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
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
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
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
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.