Denise Dellarosa Cummins

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

This book is for anyone who wonders whether to trust the media, seeks creative solutions to problems, or grapples with ethical dilemmas. Cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins clearly explains how experts in economics, philosophy, and science use seven powerful decision-making methods to tackle these challenges. These techniques include: logic, mora...

A theory proposed by Denise D. Cummins that interprets specific social cognitive functions as adaptations to the exigencies of living in a dominance (or status) hierarchy.

Reasoning about truth depends on executive functions that are applied broadly across domains and develop slowly over the course of brain maturation and development. In contrast, deontic reasoning appears to benefit from specialized cognitive architecture that develops quite quickly in childhood to facilitate cognizing the social world.

An individual’s access to resources depends not simply on the availability of resources in the environment but also upon the individual’s place within the social group. Individuals are more likely to share resources with kin than non-kin. They are also more likely to share resources with non-related individuals if those individuals have shared reso...

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous in the societies of human and nonhuman animals. These hierarchies constitute social norms that constrain behavior of individuals depending on their rank, dictating what is permitted or obligated in social interactions. They emerge as a result of individual differences in traits that impact access to resources, with...

Thriving in a complex social environment depends crucially on deontic reasoning. Humans and other social animals appear to be biologically prepared to rapidly learn what is permitted and what is forbidden in a social group, and readily detect transgressions of social norms and contracts. They also readily form alliances based on reciprocal obligati...

Nicht immer lassen sich Entscheidungen treffen, mit denen alle Beteiligten zufrieden sind. Mathematiker nennen diese Art von Problemen (oder Entscheidungsdilemmas) „Spiele“, und die damit verbundenen optimalen Entscheidungen können durch die Spieltheorie bestimmt werden. Das Kapitel befasst sich mit der Spieltheorie und unserem Verhalten, das häufi...

Sehen wir nur, was wir sehen wollen? Eine äußerst hartnäckige Vorliebe des rationalen Denkens ist, nach Beweisen zu suchen, die die eigene aufgestellte Hypothese bestätigen, anstatt die Strategie umzukehren und nach Beweisen zu suchen, die sie widerlegen. Aber ist die eigene Hypothese korrekt? Es gibt zahlreiche Fallen, in die wir tappen, wenn wir...

Eckpunkt der klassischen Entscheidungstheorie ist das Konzept eines rationalen Akteurs. Doch was der Durchschnittsbürger unter „rational“ versteht, ist nicht unbedingt dasselbe wie das, was ein Wirtschaftswissenschaftler damit meint. Man mag einen Menschen als rational beschreiben, wenn seine Denkweise besonnen, logisch und schlüssig ist. Für einen...

Wir sind bestrebt zu erfahren, was wir tun müssen, um dieses oder jenes Erlebnis oder Ereignis herbeizuführen oder auch zu vermeiden. Wir möchten einfach wissen, was durch was verursacht wird, auch wenn die Dinge sind wie sie sind und wir daran nichts ändern können. Wie vertrauen dabei auf ein einfaches Grundkonzept, das der Kausalität. Aus psychol...

Welche Strategien bemühen wir, um unsere Probleme zu lösen, seien es die kleinen Probleme des Alltags oder auch die großen bei der Entwicklung von lebensverändernden Technologien? Wenn man über einem Problem grübelt, durchforstet man seinen Wissensspeicher nach Fakten und Zusammenhängen, die zu einer Lösung führen. Problemlösung bedeutet also die S...

Gedanken müssen nicht immer zweckhaft oder zielgerichtet sein, denn der menschliche Geist hat es an sich, dass er in einem fort denkt – selbst wenn es gerade gar keine Probleme zu lösen gilt. Solche Gedanken sind lediglich eine Aneinanderreihung von Schlüssen, die in eine Erkenntnis oder eine Meinung münden. Mal begeben wir uns bewusst in Gedankeng...

Analogien sind ein zentraler Punkt menschlicher Erkenntnis und setzen voraus, dass Objekte, Ereignisse oder Sachverhalte isomorph sind, dass sie also gewisse (strukturelle) Merkmale gemeinsam haben. Zwei Objekte oder Ereignisse sind also nicht analog, weil sie sich auf dieselben Dinge beziehen, sondern, weil die Beziehungsverhältnisse zwischen dies...

Welche Rolle spielt die Moral bei der Entscheidungsfindung? Unsere Intuition scheint bisweilen sehr widersprüchlich, wenn es um moralische Fragen geht, die obendrein sehr starke emotionale Reaktionen in uns auslösen und weitreichende Auswirkungen auf das Leben anderer Menschen haben können. Im Wissen um den großen Einfluss, den moralische Dilemmas...

Evolutionary scientists distinguish between ultimate and proximate causes when explaining physical and behavioral traits. The key to understanding the impact of status lies in appreciating its relation to survival and reproductive success both during the evolutionary past and in the present lives. The necessity of surviving and thriving in a social...

Causal inference is a fundamental component of cognition and perception. Probabilistic theories of causal judgment (most notably causal Bayes networks) derive causal judgments using metrics that integrate contingency information. But human estimates typically diverge from these normative predictions. This is because human causal power judgments are...

Although standard ethical views categorize intentional torture as morally wrong, the ticking time bomb (TTB) scenario is frequently offered as a legitimate counter-example that justifies the use of torture. In this scenario, a bomb has been placed in a city by a terrorist, and the only way to defuse the bomb in time is to torture a terrorist in cus...

People consider alternative causes when deciding whether a cause is responsible for an effect (diagnostic inference) but appear to neglect them when deciding whether an effect will occur (predictive inference). Five experiments were conducted to test a 2-part explanation of this phenomenon: namely, (a) that people interpret standard predictive quer...

In their discussion of young children's deontic reasoning performance, Astington and Dack (2013) made the following claims: (1) Children need more cues to elicit cogent social norm reasoning than adults require, namely, explicit reference to authority; (2) Deontic reasoning improves with age, and this is evidence against a nativist view; (3) All ev...

A cornerstone of economic theory is that rational agents are self-interested, yet a decade of research in experimental economics has shown that economic decisions are frequently driven by concerns for fairness, equity, and reciprocity. One aspect of other-regarding behavior that has garnered attention is noblesse oblige, a social norm that obligate...

Morality has long been considered an inherent quality, an internal moral compass that is unswayed by the actions of those around us. The Solomon Asch paradigm was employed to gauge whether moral decision making is subject to conformity under social pressure as other types of decision making have been shown to be. Participants made decisions about m...

According to an influential dual-process model, a moral judgment is the outcome of a rapid, affect-laden process and a slower, deliberative process. If these outputs conflict, decision time is increased in order to resolve the conflict. Violations of deontological principles proscribing the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm are pres...

Do you know what economists mean when they refer to you as a 'rational agent'? Or why a psychologist might label your idea a 'creative insight'? Or how a philosopher could be logical but also passionate in persuading you to obey 'moral imperatives'? Or why scientists disagree about the outcomes of experiments comparing drug treatments and disease r...

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in whic...

This chapter presents a model of how semantic memory processes affect causal inferences. It provides a parameterized model of how access to the different types of counterexample affects the process. In particular, it accords a role to the overall plausibility of the proposed causal link in an if cause then effect conditional. It proposes that count...

Research in experimental economics suggests that decision making in strategic interactions is often guided by a concern for fairness. However, experimental economics studies routinely place participants of equal social status and no prior social history in anonymous interactions, a context that would tend to foster the adoption of an egalitarian fa...

Darwinian processes have produced a complex network of cognitive, emotional, and physiological systems that bias us toward producing this kind of social structure, how we are wired from higher cognition right on down to our neuroendocrinology to detect minute changes in our status vis a vis others. When Darwinian processes are allowed full play--th...

A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) 'quasi-independent' from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cogniti...

Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and “quasi-independent” from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are require...

Several researchers have reported marked differences in the abilities of expert and novice problem-solvers to reliably sort problems according to problem structure. These differences have been attributed to the possession of schematized knowledge structures by experts that are lacking in novices. The aim of the present research was to outline and t...

This book addresses three areas of current and varied interest: common sense, reasoning, and rationality. While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this book offers novel, even paradoxical, views of the relationship. The book considers what constitutes human rationality, behavior,...

This book addresses three areas of current and varied interest: common sense, reasoning, and rationality. While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this book offers novel, even paradoxical, views of the relationship. The book considers what constitutes human rationality, behavior,...

Reasoning about agents constitutes more of a challenge than reasoning about objects. Agents move of their own volition and are motivated by internal states that are essentially private and hidden from view. Social animals must also adhere to social norms that are rarely explicitly represented. Competing or cooperating successfully in such a dynamic...

Many economic and evolutionary theories have modeled cooperation as the evolutionary outcome of decisions made by autonomous, self-interested agents operating in a social vacuum. In this paper we consider the implications for cooperative interactions when prior social structures and corresponding social norms exist. In particular we investigate the...

Like all social animals, humans live in social environments that exert extraordinary cognitive and socio-emotional pressures. Extracting the social norms that implicitly (or explicitly) regulate our behavior and allow continued group membership is crucially important, as is developing the capacity to read the intentions, desires, and beliefs of oth...

Dominance hierarchies are ubiquitous in the societies of human and non-human animals. Evidence from comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychological investigations is presented that show how social dominance hierarchies shaped the evolution of the human mind, and hence, human social institutions. It is argued that the pressures that arise fr...

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other 'nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate mo...

Minds, Brains, and Computers is a vital resource -- the most comprehensive interdisciplinary selection of seminal papers in the foundations of cognitive science, from leading figures in artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Computationalism was an attractive research program for psychology. The idea that the mind is essentially a functionally specified computational process running on the brain, consisting of a supply of mental mechanisms with precisely specified properties (anything you can program), that affords medium independence (the possibility that thought can...

The connectionist revolution forever altered the once uniform landscape of cognitive science as it existed under the sway of the computationalist paradigm. In this chapter, we briefly summarize what connectionist networks are and why they are attractive.

Everyone who is not a dualist believes that mental processes are processes that go on in the brain. If one's goal is a science of the mind, however, observation of the brain seems to yield results on the wrong side of Leibniz's Gap. The computationalist response to this problem is to try to understand cognitive processes in abstraction from the bra...

While many issues in cognitive science are parochial to one or another specialized subdiscipline, the ones discusses here--innateness ,modularity, eliminativism, and evolutionary psychology--are over-arching. No one involved in cognitive science can be indifferent to these issues because they all have serious implications for every approach to the...

Cheater detection plays a crucial role in biologial and psychological theories of the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity. Here it is argued that cheater detection plays a broader role in social coordination as a fundamental, primitive cognitive adaptation to dominance hierarchies. In functional terms, dominance means that certain individuals...

Cheater detection plays a crucial role in biologial and psychological theories of the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity. Here it is argued that cheater detection plays a broader role in social coordination as a fundamental, primitive cognitive adaptation to dominance hierarchies. In functional terms, dominance means that certain individuals...

Cheater detection plays a crucial role in biologial and psychological theories of the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity. Here it is argued that cheater detection plays a broader role in social coordination as a fundamental, primitive cognitive adaptation to dominance hierarchies. In functional terms, dominance means that certain individuals...

Cheater detection plays a crucial role in biologial and psychological theories of the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity. Here it is argued that cheater detection plays a broader role in social coordination as a fundamental, primitive cognitive adaptation to dominance hierarchies. In functional terms, dominance means that certain individuals...

Certain recurring themes have emerged from research on intelligent behavior from literatures as diverse as developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, human reasoning and problem solving, and primatology. These themes include the importance of sensitivity to goal structure rather than action sequences in intelligent learning, the capaci...

Fairley and Manktelow (1997) have mistaken an error of presentation for an error of substance. My causal theory remains the same: Causal reasoning scenarios that require the reasoner to decide whether or not an effect will occur in the presence of a viable cause trigger consideration of disabling conditions—that is, factors that could prevent the e...

Several decision-making theorists have made two claims regarding human rationality. The first is that formal rationality (that is, rationality that can be defined in terms of adherence to normative formulae or rules) applies only to the behavior of species that can explicitly represent and verbalize these formulae or rules. Yet counter-evidence to...

Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what one may, ought, or ought not do in a given set of circumstances. Virtually all of our social institutions and child-rearing practices presume the capacity to reason about deontic concepts, such as what is permitted, obligated, or prohibited. Despite this, very little is known about the development of deonti...

Research from ethology and evolutionary biology indicates the following about the evolution of reasoning capacity. First, solving problems of social competition and cooperation have direct impact on survival rates and reproductive success. Second, the social structure that evolved from this pressure is the dominance hierarchy. Third, primates that...

Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what one may, ought, or ought not do in a given set of circumstances. Virtually all of our social institutions and child-rearing practices presume the capacity to reason about deontic concepts, such as what is permitted, obligated, or prohibited. Despite this, very little is known about the development of deonti...

When reasoning about deontic rules (what one may, should, or should not do in a given set of circumstances), reasoners adopt a violation-detection strategy, a strategy they do not adopt when reasoning about indicative rules (descriptions of purported state of affairs). I argue that this indicative-deontic distinction constitutes a primitive in the...

Evidence is presented that implicates two factors in deductive reasoning about causality. The factors are alternative causes and disabling conditions (factors that prevent effects from occurring in the presence of viable causes). A causal analysis is presented in which these factors impact on judgments concerning causal necessity and sufficiency, w...

Reports an error in the original article by D. D. Cummins ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1992[Sep], Vol 18[5], 1103–2124). On page 1111, there are labeling errors in 2 figures. In Figure 1c, problem 11 should have a "V' in the topic column; that line should read "11 V Fl.' In Figure 1d, problems 2 and 4 shoul...

In 3 experiments, novices were required to answer questions while reading a series of problems. The questions required them either to analyze individual problem structures (intraproblem processing) or compare problem structures (analogical comparison processing) to derive answers. Ss who engaged in problem comparison processing were found to catego...

In 3 experiments, novices were required to answer questions while reading a series of problems. The questions required them either to analyze individual problem structures (intraproblem processing) or compare problem structures (analogical comparison processing) to derive answers. Ss who engaged in problem comparison processing were found to catego...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate children's interpretations of standard arithmetic word problems and the factors that influence their interpretations. In Experiment 1, children were required to solve a series of problems and then to draw and select pictures that represented the problems' structures. Solution performance was found to va...

An experiment was conducted to investigate the relative contributions of syntactic form and content to conditional reasoning. The content domain chosen was that of causation. Conditional statements that described causal relationships (if mean value of cause, then mean value of effect) were embedded in simple arguments whose entailments are governed...

Word problems are notoriously difficult to solve. We suggest that much of the difficulty children experience with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. We tested this hypothesis by (1) requiring children to recall problems either before or after solving them, (2) requiring them to generate fi...

ARITHPRO is a computer simulation of children’s arithmetic word-problem solving behavior. It is an instantiation of a recently proposed cognitive model of the knowledge and procedures required to solve such problems. The program solves word problems by (1) comprehending the story text in which the problem is embedded, (2) comprehending numerical in...

Deficient processing theories of the spacing effect attribute poor recall of massed-repeated items to a failure to process one or both of the presentations fully. An implication of this approach is that anything that increases the probability that a repetition will receive full processing, or conversely, anything that decreases the probability that...

Three experiments are reported that investigate the effect of decision-making on memory. In Experiment 1, subjects were found to recall, following a delay, more facts that supported decisions they had made concerning three texts than facts that contradicted their decisions. Recognition of both types of facts was equivalent, however. The same result...

The spectral efficiency of blackness induction was measured in three normal trichromatic observers and in one deuteranomalous observer. The psychophysical task was to adjust the radiance of a monochromatic 60–120′ annulus until a 45′ central broadband field just turned black and its contour became indiscriminable from a dark surrounding gap that se...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Colorado, 1984. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-132). Film copy in Univ. Microfilms, Ann Arbor.