It is commonplace to diagnose daunting collective challenges, including racism and climate change, as primarily “structural” in nature. Their causes are thought to emerge from our shared activity, and crucially involve beyond-the-individual factors including laws, economies, cultural power dynamics, history, norms, and built environments. It is also often said that these structural problems demand structural solutions. These so-called structural solutions are contrasted with individual-level reforms, such as, when it comes to combating climate change, recycling, making “green” consumer decisions, and changing our eating habits (e.g., by consuming less meat).

While we agree that structural reforms are absolutely essential to address these challenges, we argue that it is a mistake to conceive individual and structural change as mutually-exclusive alternatives. Rather, we develop a range of arguments and examples showing how they are mutually-supporting complements. We argue for moving beyond oppositional thinking about structural change and individual action, offering in its place a picture of structural change and individual action as symbiotic. On this view, the most important individual actions are those that facilitate structural change, and the most important structural changes are those that reshape the ways individuals think, feel, and act toward one another and their shared world.

We have already published one paper on these themes specifically as they relate to climate activism and another as they relate to antiracist moral education.

This paper has two aims: first, to introduce a philosophical audience to research on implicit and explicit biases related to age; and second, to identify and explain biases within social-scientific research. In the first case, evidence drawn from massive datasets, including both large linguistic corpora and online tests with millions of participants, shows that implicit ageism has stayed remarkably persistent across time and space. This persistence stands in contrast to explicit ageism and other implicit biases, many of which have declined dramatically in the 21st century. In the second case, however, researchers have been preoccupied with a small fraction of biases related to age: for example, against the old rather than the young, and against ‘old people in general’ rather than specific oppressed older subgroups. Claims about the all-around intransigence of ageism are thus oversimplified overgeneralizations, which fail to heed lessons from contextual, embodied, critical, and intersectional perspectives on the social mind and world. Stubbornly flawed assumptions and methods have prevented the social sciences from addressing core questions for intergenerational justice, including the systematic disempowerment of the young. Fortunately, there is nothing inevitable leading to these oversights; empirical developments in the 2020s suggest that these limitations can—and have begun to be—overcome.

This paper is currently under review. I have also begun a companion piece focused specifically on the ways that ageism affects people differently based on their race, gender, class, and other salient social categories, tentatively titled “Intersectionality, Ageism, and Intergenerational Justice.”

It is commonplace to suggest that incorporating algorithms and artificial intelligence into real-world decision-making inevitably involves a tradeoff between fairness and accuracy. We are told that we face an exclusive, either/or choice between 1) optimizing for “accuracy,” in the epistemic sense of reflecting reality (or at least reflecting the available data) as closely as possible, or 2) optimizing for “fairness” in one of several moral senses, such as treating people the same way regardless of their social group membership, or combating (rather than reinforcing) inherited inequities. While it’s true that there are inevitable decision-making tradeoffs (whether or not we use algorithms, AI, or other technologies), framing these tradeoffs in terms of fairness versus accuracy is a mistake. First, there is no unique or privileged algorithmic optimization that can lay claim to being most epistemically accurate. Second, questions about the fairness of an algorithm lie (as far as I can tell) with how the algorithm is used, and toward what ends, rather than with how it’s optimized.

I have presented this paper, which builds on arguments about the relationship between ethics and epistemology that I first developed in “Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias” (2016), at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Vancouver, April 2022, and at an invited colloquium at Lund University in Sweden, May 2023. Further research on this project will be supported with the grant I received to Co-Direct a Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona.

In a series of recent papers (and a book), Martin Jönsson (Lund University) and colleagues have developed and defended a novel post hoc intervention for counteracting bias. Most interventions aimed at prejudice mitigation are ante hoc; they are attempts to intervene before prejudice manifests. These include individual interventions that attempt to make people less prejudiced, as well as most structural interventions that attempt to change the context to stop prejudices from manifesting, such as anonymization (see my “Individual and Structural Interventions” (2020) for an overview). By contrast, Jönsson and colleagues’ post hoc intervention leverages technology and statistical inference to step in after people have given a biased evaluation but before that evaluation leads to an ultimate outcome. For example, if students are more likely to give negatively biased evaluations of instructors from certain social groups, this post hoc intervention can detect and then correct for these biases.

I have begun to collaborate with Jönsson’s team on this project, including in applications for large national grants in Sweden. There are numerous conceptual, ethical, and technical questions remaining to work out. In one collaboration, we are exploring a range of strategies for estimating what the “correct” evaluations would be in the absence of bias.

My sights for the next few years are set on projects exploring the intersection of ethics, cognitive science, and social biases with emerging technologies. I plan to write a book, which was awarded funding for a year of dedicated writing by the NEH, grappling with the following question: why do we fall so easily for the misinformation spreading across our news feeds and social networks? Leading psychological and philosophical theories of belief formation attempt to answer this question by portraying belief in reductively cognitive-mechanistic terms. Gullibility is, on these views, built into the basic architecture of our brains, an incorrigible component of the core computational and representational mechanisms underlying human mental life. I critically examine these theories and develop a novel alternative, urging that belief formation is essentially holistic, and complexly interconnected with affect, social cognition, and narrative cognition. My argument is informed by a careful analysis of empirical research, but also grounded in insights about belief, storytelling, and interpretation developed in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. I aim to build on these insights to better understand, and ultimately to overcome, the challenges posed by massive online misinformation.

This project will thus contribute to both humanistic and scientific studies of the social mind, by bringing the tools and methods from phenomenology and hermeneutics to bear on an enduring question for cognitive and social science: how do minds believe? Leading scientific approaches fail to capture how belief interacts with the cognitive habits and social practices of storytelling and interpretation. Recent philosophical scholarship risks swinging too far in the other direction; scholars may overlook how ongoing empirical developments variously support and complicate their best insights. By renewing the commitment to interdisciplinarity held by 20th-century phenomenologists including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon, I will offer a case study in what these distinct traditions can teach each other.

More broadly, this project illuminates how our minds interact with emerging technologies to promote the spread of misinformation. What makes us so susceptible to “fake news” and online misinformation? What drives us to retreat into “echo chambers” in which we only encounter likeminded views? Leading treatments fall into one of three camps. One analyzes the spread of misinformation as a purely structural problem owing to the architecture of our social networks and news feeds, and the algorithms underlying them. Another analyzes the problem as a result of motivated reasoning and “tribal” identity overriding our rationality and evidence sensitivity. A final camp treats the problem as an offshoot of the coldly computational mechanisms underlying human cognition. I argue that all three factors, and more besides, play a role, and interrelate in rich ways. By better understanding how these factors intertwine, I hope to make progress toward untangling them, and building better structural and cognitive methods for resisting misinformation.

We were awarded this NSF grant to pursue a range of interventions to improve student belonging and performance at Cal Poly Pomona. There are two primary types of classroom-based interventions that my part of this grant is exploring. One is utility-value interventions, wherein students are led to reflect specifically on the utility of course material to their personal lives. Another is social belonging interventions, in which students reflect on narratives written by prior students (reflecting a diverse array of social backgrounds and identities), who describe their initial struggles with wondering whether they belonged at CPP, and concluding with the steps students took to overcome these struggles (e.g., building relationships with classmates and instructors, developing efficient study habits, etc.). We have tested these interventions in introductory calculus and physics courses, and some of our early findings have been published in two papers in Education Sciences and one in the International Journal of STEM Education.

Our next paper in preparation from this research program is “A Utility Value Intervention to Support Undergraduate Student Interest, Engagement, and Achievement in Calculus and Calculus-Based Physics,” with Viviane Seyranian, Ian Thacker, Nina Abramzon, Paul Beardsley, and Nicole Duong. In this study, 471 undergraduate students in either Calculus II or Calculus-based Newtonian Physics at Cal Poly Pomona were randomly assigned to either read essays written by peers emphasizing the usefulness of their coursework in their daily life (more on these essays below) or to a control group. We found that students in the intervention condition reported significantly higher levels of utility value, midterm grades, and course grades. Our path analysis revealed that utility value indirectly improved achievement through interest and engagement factors. Participation in the UV activity was also a marginally significant predictor of posttest flourishing after adjusting for pretest flourishing. We discuss how to increase utility-value messaging to increase student success and promote student well-being, especially in critical STEM transition courses. Our interdisciplinary team has presented this work at several venues, including the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education in Reno, October 2023.

We generated quotes for the courses by conducting focus groups with former students in the courses who were asked to write about how content from the course might be relevant to their lives. Back in Spring 2019, we ran numerous small focus groups with students from a wide range of social backgrounds who had taken the relevant introductory courses. My role was specifically to lead focus groups for undergraduate men. This was my first time running focus groups, and it was exciting to learn about and practice developing the new set of skills required. For example, getting a group of young men to share openly their feelings and anxieties was not always easy!

My contention in earlier work that implicit biases constitute a distinctive kind of mental state has compelled me to think more broadly about the nature of mental kinds, such as belief, desire, emotion, and intention.  I am currently preparing a manuscript on the nature of belief.  I critically examine the influential “Spinozan” theory of belief formation, according to which the mind is dramatically more gullible than we tend to think.  This theory, introduced by psychologist Daniel Gilbert in the 1990s and now gaining popularity among philosophers (e.g., Bryce Huebner, Andy Egan, and Eric Mandelbaum), states that the mind automatically believes every proposition that it entertains, although it can subsequently reject that belief with mental effort.  I argue that, although the theory is not as radical as it might sound, it is nevertheless beset with internal confusions and, worse, is ill-supported by the empirical evidence, including the key studies Gilbert and colleagues performed to defend the theory.  I conclude by advising caution about the prospects of developing any purely cognitive, mechanistic account of belief.  The mechanisms of belief, I propose, are irredeemably entangled with emotion and desire.

Black Lives Matter and other grassroots organizations constituting the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) have quickly gained worldwide visibility as a broad social justice movement distinguished by a decentralized, non-hierarchal mode of organization. MBL rose to prominence in part thanks to its protests against police brutality and misconduct directed at black Americans. However, its animating concerns are far broader, calling for a wide range of economic, political, legal, and cultural measures to address what it terms a “war against Black people” as well as the “shared struggle with all oppressed people.” Ours will be the first volume to bring philosophical analysis to bear on the aims, strategies, policy positions, and intellectual-historical context of MBL. The book will treat the following themes: “Black Lives Matter” as a political speech act, MBL’s conception of the value of black lives, the gender dynamics of MBL, the relation of MBL to other black liberation movements as well as transitional justice movements, the affective concerns of MBL, the new forms of leadership and organization emerging from the Movement, and the impact of racism on the normative assessment of punishment and the broader criminal justice system. Accordingly, the volume broaches a wide range of pressing issues in the philosophy of language, social/political philosophy, philosophy of race and gender, philosophy of punishment, and philosophical psychology.

Despite the significance of the social, political, and economic goals of MBL, as well as the innovative organizational leadership strategies it employs, MBL has received little sustained philosophical attention. Our volume responds to the intellectual and political urgency of MBL with a variety of philosophical approaches. While none of the chapters presume deep familiarity with technical literature, each contribution promises a rigorous philosophical investigation of its theme, and we have secured chapter commitments from many of the leading scholars in the associated fields. The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives will thus be of interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and philosophy professors. It will also appeal to scholars in government, political theory, and African-American studies working on social justice movements, racial inequality, democratic theory, and cognate issues.

• Chapter 1, “Introducing Implicit Bias: Why this Book Matters,” co-written with Erin Beeghly
• Chapter 12, “Individual and Structural Interventions” (my contribution to the volume)
• Purchase from Routledge
• Purchase from Bookshop
• Purchase from Amazon Smile

It is now well-established that unintentional or unreported biases shape all aspects of social life.  Imagine walking through a grocery store.  The smaller the floor tiles, research shows, the slower people tend to walk.  The slower people walk, the more they buy.  These unconscious biases are well-known to marketers and consumer psychologists.  Yet store shoppers do not notice the ways in which the floor’s tile-size affects how they walk or their spending decisions.

Examples such as this are only the tip of the iceberg.  Increasingly, psychologists cite unconscious mental processes to explain persistent social inequities and injustices in a broad range of contexts, including educational, corporate, medical, and informal contexts.  Implicit biases have been invoked to explain heightened police violence against black US citizens, as well as subtle forms of discrimination in the criminal justice system and underrepresentation of women and people of color in the workplace.  Now a popular buzz word, “implicit bias” was even discussed by likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. Presidential debates.

Our handbook is the first philosophical introduction for beginners on topic of implicit bias.  It addresses fundamental questions about such biases, including:

• What is implicit bias? 
• How do implicit biases relate to other, more familiar mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions? 
• What is ‘implicit’ about implicit bias?
• How do implicit biases relate to explicit biases and prejudices?
• How do implicit biases compromise our knowledge of others and social reality?
• How do implicit biases affect our social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat these influences?  
• What are the empirical and normative sources of skepticism about the nature and social-political significance of implicit bias?