Tania Lombrozo
Tania Lombrozo is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Lombrozo directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab, where she and her students study aspects of human cognition at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including the drive to explain and its relationship to understanding, various aspects of causal and moral reasoning and all kinds of learning.
Lombrozo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER award, a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformational Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science. She received bachelors degrees in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. Lombrozo also blogs for Psychology Today.
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Tania Lombrozo looks at a new paper arguing that research on the public's understanding of science often conflates knowledge and understanding — and that this conflation has costs.
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Despite my skepticism at the outset, for a light and amusing TV sitcom "The Good Place" does a pretty good job with philosophy — and a pretty good job with human psychology, too, says Tania Lombrozo.
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People see the causes of mass shootings differently, depending on whether they own guns. Those who don't own guns often blame such incidents on the widespread availability of guns — but owners do not.
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Not all feelings of curiosity are the same. A study finds that one factor affecting the balance of negative and positive when it comes to curiosity is time, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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In the child's world of Twenty Questions, it's pretty easy to evaluate what makes a good question. But producing good questions in the real world can be a more complicated affair, says Tania Lombrozo.
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Many things can be learned just as well later — so the focus should be on ones that really need to be early, like languages, music and communication, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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Scientific conclusions and scientific methods can change: Understanding how and why these changes occur reveals why science is our best bet for getting the facts right, says Tania Lombrozo.
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New research indicates that people are inclined to over-attribute positive traits to themselves, especially when it comes to moral virtue — which is concerning, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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It's not possible to be both because it's not possible to be either: The ideal mother and the ideal worker are equally fictitious, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
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Science isn't a universal mechanism for guiding beliefs, but it's our best guide to the natural world: If we can agree on that, there's a chance the rest will follow, says blogger Tania Lombrozo.