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. We hope to have a first draft of the book manuscript complete by the Summer 2022.

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
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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?

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 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.

Background. The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation and identified online teaching modes associated with these feelings.

Results. Surveys from a racially diverse group of undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) revealed that interactive synchronous instruction was positively associated with feelings of interest and belonging, particularly for students of color, while noninteractive instruction reduced social belonging but was related to more cognitive engagement. Small group interviews with these students suggest that students derived feelings of connectedness from their instructors, peers, and prior experiences and relied on their sense of competency to motivate themselves in the course and feel a sense of belonging. Two embedded cases of students in physics classrooms are compared to highlight the range of student feelings of connectedness and competency during the lockdown.

Conclusions. Findings reaffirm that social interaction tends to support belonging and engagement, particularly for underrepresented (Black/African American, Hispanic) groups in STEM. STEM instructors who aim to support feelings of belonging and engagement in virtual learning environments should consider increasing opportunities for student-student and student-teacher interaction as well as taking a flexible approach that validates and integrates student voice into instruction. Future research is needed to further explore the themes of relatedness and competency that emerged as aspects of course belonging.

Recent moral psychology casts doubt on the capacity of moral education to create meaningful change. Some raise questions about the stability of the traits of character associated with moral knowledge; others focus on the difficulty of teaching the skills associated with acting in morally knowledgeable ways. In this paper, we articulate a separate concern about moral education that grows out of research on moral psychology, and then sketch a path for responding to it.

It is increasingly recognized that the psychology of moral agency is deeply social. The most important causes of our morally-relevant thoughts and behavior are the things that distinguish our social environments from one another, rather than the things that distinguish individuals from one another. The upshot of this might be taken to be extreme situationism; that there is no purpose to the provision of a moral education, because what really drives individuals’ thought and behavior are their social environments.

We argue that this would be the wrong lesson, however, or at least an incomplete one. Given the social nature of human moral agency, we argue that moral education must involve the teaching of structure-facing virtues. These involve knowledge, skills, and traits of character that individuals can use to shape, engineer, and thus change their social environments. We elaborate on the nature of such virtues by examining a case study: the problem of political misinformation. In short: we argue that the shortcomings of contemporary moral education are traceable to its disproportionate emphasis on interpersonal questions, how particular individuals ought to treat other particular individuals, and that moral education must be broadened to teach individuals about the structures they inhabit, and about how they can shape and are shaped by those structures. 

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 will test these interventions in introductory calculus and physics courses beginning Spring 2020.

Spring 2019 was dedicated to preparing materials and collecting narratives from students about social belonging. To this end, 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! In the future, I hope to further contribute to Departmental Assessment by running “exit survey” focus groups with our graduating philosophy majors. Currently, on the basis of our focus group findings, we are writing a paper assembling our qualitative findings from these focus groups, identifying different “personality types,” with an emphasis on the different challenges and successes facing women versus men coming to Cal Poly Pomona. We will start testing our interventions in classrooms in Spring 2020.

This project builds on prior research that Viviane Seyranian (CPP, Psychology), Nina Abramzon (CPP, Physics), and I did studying interventions to promote belonging, well-being, and academic success among women, first-generation college students, and members of underrepresented groups in introductory courses in Physics, Economics, and Philosophy. Our first paper based on this data, published in International Journal of STEM Education (2018), focused on longitudinal changes in women versus men’s belonging, flourishing, and STEM identification in introductory physics, and the downstream effects of these factors on academic performance. Follow-up papers specifically focused on the Philosophy and Econ data are in preparation.

Amartya Sen (2006) argues that sectarian discord and violence are often attributable, in part, to the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of a single social group standing in opposition to other groups (Sunni vs. Shia, East vs. West, etc.). Sen thus argues that we must recognize that we inevitably belong to many different groups (e.g., ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes) and that we are obligated to choose, in any given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. We argue that Sen’s account is both descriptively and normatively flawed, and overlooks significant lessons from feminist thinkers such as Elizabeth Spelman and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Sen’s account is descriptively flawed because it wrongly assumes that individuals’ identity affiliations are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation. It is normatively flawed, first, because requiring individuals to prioritize among “identities” that are not actually separable is unfair, and, second, because this requirement is particularly unfair for members of multiple disadvantaged groups, e.g., women of color living in poverty. Even if their identities were in-principle separable, requiring these individuals to prioritize among them may simply compound the injustices and disadvantages they already suffer. Such a forced choice obscures the particular injustices they face, i.e., injustices that reflect a complex combination of racism, sexism, and classism.

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.

Scholars and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern behaviors and consumption choices individual citizens can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g., eating less meat). The latter focus instead on institutions that shape collective action, such as state and national laws, industrial policies, and international treaties. While the distinction between individualism and structuralism—the latter of which we take to include “institutional”, “systemic”, and “collectivist” approaches—is intuitive and ubiquitous, the two approaches are often portrayed as oppositional, as if one or the other is the superior route to decarbonization.

We argue instead for a more symbiotic conception of structural and individual reform. For every structural reform to prioritize, there are individual reforms to prioritize because they contribute to that structural reform. And for each individual reform to prioritize, there are structural reforms to put in place because they enable individuals to make the prescribed behavioral changes. A symbiotic conception of structural and individual reform ultimately promotes a “both/and” approach to meeting the climate crisis. Instead of debating whether to focus either on lifestyle and consumer change or corporate and policy change, advocates should instead think in terms of “both/and” packages of changes. These will identify which specific individual-level changes in lifestyle, consumption, and activism best complement those specific structural transformations to economies and political systems that will combat climate change, and vice versa. Individuals and structures are interdependent and mutually supporting; strategic changes to both are needed.

In the opinion issued in Floyd v. City of New York, Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, “This case is about the tension between liberty and public safety in the use of a proactive policing tool.”  Such statements portray the debate about racial and ethnic profiling as a clash between opposing moral perspectives on crime and terrorism.  Defenders appeal to dramatic reductions in crime; opponents appeal to violations of rights.  Scheindlin conceded that stop-and-frisk might reduce crime, but insisted that its effectiveness was irrelevant to its constitutionality.  The result is a standoff between consequentialist or utilitarian considerations in favor of profiling, and deontological or rights-based considerations against it.

Conceding the effectiveness of profiling constitutes a grave oversight in building the case against it.  I plan to correct this oversight by developing an evidence-based analysis of the consequences of profiling.  My book will cover a series of interrelated questions in moral and political philosophy, race studies, legal theory, and cognitive and social psychology.  In addition to the central question how such practices affect crime, I will examine the social, cognitive, and behavioral consequences on the targets and perpetrators of profiling, as well as on the wider community.  Given what we know, I will argue that profiling is an ineffective, sometimes even counterproductive, policing tool, which brings a host of social and psychological costs in tow. 

Philosophically, I am sympathetic to the concern that profiling violates individual’s rights and dignity, but the refusal to countenance evidence regarding its effectiveness strikes defenders as naïve.  (Consider, e.g., the defiant and inflammatory response of New York’s mayor to Scheindlin’s ruling.[7])  The moral burden falls to opponents to show that the efficacy of profiling is no self-evident “mathematical fact,” but is, rather, empirically unfounded.  Racial profiling is ineffective for the narrow aim of reducing crime, and brings in its wide wake a litany of destructive social and psychological consequences.

Here is a proposal for a seminar I’d like to give on these issues.

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[1] Arkes & Tetlock (2004, p.272), Psychological Inquiry.

[2] Scheindlin (August 12^th 2013, p.3).

[3] Glaser (2006), Journal of Policy Analysis and Management; Glaser (forthcoming), Oxford University Press.

[4] Jamieson et al. (2013), Psychological science; Chen & Bargh (1997), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

[5] Cortina et al. (2011), Journal of Management.

[6] Hackney and Glaser (forthcoming), Law and Human Behavior.

[7] Gray et al. (August 16^th, 2013), “Bloomberg blasts stop-and-frisk judge as ‘some woman’ who knows ‘zero’ about cops.” New York Daily News.