Jonathan Schooler

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

This essay reviews the discrepancies between the phenomenal experience of time and the characterization of time as it is currently conceptualized by modern physics. Three aspects of the subjective quality of time are identified: (1) the present is privileged and distinct from the past and future in that it is the exclusive time at which observers e...

While meditation research has primarily focused on mental health outcomes and immediate cognitive and affective benefits, little is known about its influence on higher-order beliefs, such as views on free will and personal agency. Despite substantial references to free will and related concepts in Buddhist philosophy, to our knowledge, there has be...

The current research represents one of the first attempts to investigate how various thought qualities that naturally fluctuate across attention states (i.e., mind wandering vs. present-focused attention) impact mood. Of specific interest was whether thought valence may account for previously reported effects of attention state on mood. To examine...

In today’s knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evide...

We are all familiar with the feeling of being stuck when a problem we are faced with seems intractable and we are unable to find a solution. But sometimes, a new way of seeing the problem pops into the mind from out of the blue. The missing piece of the puzzle is found, the gap is filled, and the solution is now obvious. This is the insight experie...

Given how commonly GPS is now used in everyday navigation, it is surprising how little research has been dedicated to investigating variations in its use and how such variations may relate to navigation ability. The present study investigated general GPS dependence, how people report using GPS in various navigational scenarios, and the relationship...

Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal...

Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental f...

Introduction Throughout history, technological and societal changes consistently receive suspicion. Their influences appear damaging, corrupting, and potential precursors to societal downfall, with today’s youth often portrayed as the primary victims. This study aims to explore an underlying reason for these perceptions and to investigate why socie...

Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast...

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of id...

People’s confidence in their face memory, both generally and in specific cases, is somewhat calibrated to their ability—but not strongly. Investigating N=23,893 American adults, we show those most confident in their judgments (state confidence) are less accurate than those who are slightly less confident. This occurs due to a unique nonlinearity in...

In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about—an anonymous actor. This is inconsistent with our everyday judgments of the actions of others. Here we test the novel prediction of whether actions are considered as comparably virtuous or malignant when performed by a good person,...

Verbalizing visual memories can interfere with later accurate recall. Whereas changes in the magnitude of this verbal overshadowing effect (VOE) as a function of delay have been reported, no study has systematically investigated multiple shorter nonimmediate delays. Does VOE happen when verbalization occurs 5-min postencoding? 10 min? 15 min? We sh...

Can watching avant-garde film temporarily shift individuals’ thinking styles? What factors influence how individuals respond to avant-garde films? The perception of meaning is a critical element in the positive reception of visual artworks and may be an important mediating step in influencing creative thought. This highlights a unique problem for a...

Throughout history, new technological/societal changes have been viewed with suspicion, their influences interpreted as damaging, corrupting, a potential cause of societal downfall. The youth of the day are particularly seen as the victims of such developments. Why do we keep seeing technology/societal change as being harmful to young people? Two s...

If explicitly, blatantly dehumanizing a group of people—overtly characterizing them as less than human—facilitates harming them, then reversing this process is paramount. Addressing dehumanization among American political partisans appears especially crucial, given that it has been linked to their anti-democratic hostility. Perhaps because of its o...

Ever since some scientists and popular media put forward the idea that free will is an illusion, the question has risen what would happen if people stopped believing in free will. Psychological research has investigated this question by testing the consequences of experimentally weakening people’s free will beliefs. The results of these investigati...

The behavioral immune system (BIS) is an evolved psychological mechanism that motivates prophylactic avoidance of disease vectors by eliciting disgust. When felt toward social groups, disgust can dampen empathy and promote dehumanization. Therefore, we investigated whether the BIS facilitates the dehumanization of groups associated with disease by...

Adults perceive the youth of the present as being worse than from when they were young. This phenomenon has been shown to be a product of a memory bias, adults are unable to accurately recall what children were like in the past so they impose their current selves onto their memories. In two studies using American adults ( N = 2,764), we seek to con...

Researchers since the 1950s have invested a great deal in creating “gold standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in a controlled laboratory setting. Despite the successes in developing reliable and widely used instruments, these efforts have come at the cost of not using ecologically- and face-valid tasks. In this paper, we descri...

Epistemic curiosity—the desire for knowledge—is typically thought to benefit learning. In four preregistered studies, we show that interest curiosity, a facet of epistemic curiosity characterized by joyful exploration, is indeed associated with traits and abilities that benefit learning. These include general knowledge, intellectual humility, and d...

Verbalizing visual memories can interfere with later accurate recall. Whereas changes in the magnitude of this Verbal Overshadowing effect as a function of delay have been reported, no study has systematically investigated multiple shorter non-immediate delays. Does VOE happen when verbalization occurs 5-minutes post-encoding? 10-minutes? 15-minute...

Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phe...

The conceptual overlap between mind-wandering and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related impairments is considerable, yet little experimental research examining this overlap among children is available. The current study aims to experimentally manipulate mind-wandering among children with and without ADHD and examine effects on tas...

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction about them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldview beliefs such as “people’s core qualities are fixed” and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first exp...

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of id...

Background: Controversy surrounds psychedelics and their potential to boost creativity. To date, psychedelic studies lack a uniform conceptualization of creativity and methodologically rigorous designs. Aims: This study aimed at addressing previous issues by examining the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on creativity using multimodal...

When people talk about their values they refer to what is meaningful to them. Although meaning is associated with life satisfaction, previous studies report inconsistent results regarding the association of values and well-being. A cross-sectional study (N = 276) addresses the research question, do values influence experiences of meaning and subjec...

Dehumanization, the belief that other people are less than fully human, dampens empathy, increases animosity, and catalyzes conflict between groups. Research has revealed that a troubling number of American partisans blatantly dehumanize members of the other party. Nonetheless, this research has also found that partisans substantially overestimate...

Dehumanization has played a prominent role in myriad human atrocities, which inspired us to investigate its social–cognitive basis. Since dehumanization consists of perceiving another to lack a defining human essence, scholars have suggested the process is grounded in psychological essentialism, the belief that members of a group all share an under...

Although research suggests that phone usage during academic activities is problematic for learning and performance, little is known about high school students’ digital multitasking during homework. This exploratory descriptive study surveyed 135 students from four public U.S. high schools to investigate teenagers’ attitudes towards digital distract...

As research on mind wandering has accelerated, the construct's defining features have expanded and researchers have begun to examine different dimensions of mind wandering. Recently, Christoff and colleagues have argued for the importance of investigating a hitherto neglected variety of mind wandering: "unconstrained thought," or, thought that is r...

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction for them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldviews such as “people’s core qualities are fixed”, and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment...

The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more th...

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction for them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldviews such as “people’s core qualities are fixed”, and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment...

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction for them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldviews such as “people’s core qualities are fixed”, and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment...

What are the daydreams of creative individuals like? Do they reflect the daydreamer’s level of creativity? To answer this question, this research examines the daydreams of creative writers and ordinary people. Among several daydream qualities, the research focused particularly on curiosity, or the extent to which daydreams revolve around unresolved...

Epistemic curiosity (the desire for knowledge) is considered a catalyst for learning and innovation. The current research reveals another, darker side of curiosity, which emerges when we examine the independent contributions of the two facets that make up epistemic curiosity—interest and deprivation curiosity. In four preregistered studies (collect...

Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether real-time and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings. Consist...

According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as t...

Whether free will exists is a longstanding philosophical debate. Cognitive neuroscience and popular media have been putting forward the idea that free will is an illusion, raising the question of what would happen if people stopped believing in free will altogether. Psychological research has investigated this question by testing the consequences o...

A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly a...

Metadehumanization, the perception that members of an outgroup dehumanize your group, has been found to exacerbate intergroup conflict by inspiring reciprocal dehumanization of the offending outgroup. Moreover, metadehumanization is distinct from metaprejudice (i.e., the perception that an outgroup hates your group). Given the mutual animosity repo...

Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in ‘stimulus-independent thoughts' (SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate external environment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven by stimuli in one's external environment (i.e. stimulus-dependent thoughts;...

A classic definition of intrusive thinking is “any distinct, identifiable cognitive event that is unwanted, unintended, and recurrent. It interrupts the fl ow of thought, interferes in task performance, is associated with negative affect, and is difficult to control” (Clark 2005:4). While easy to understand and applicable to many cases, this defini...

Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of optimal methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experi...

Curiosity—the desire to know—is a powerful motivator for learning and behavior. Theoretical and anecdotal discussions have also linked curiosity to creativity and innovation, but there is little empirical evidence for this connection, aside from a handful of recent studies. We review the existing evidence and discuss potential mechanisms through wh...

People often fail to keep their mind from wandering. Here, we examine how the tendency to mind wander is affected by people’s beliefs, or lay theories. Building on research on lay theories and self-regulation, we test whether differences in people’s beliefs about the extent to which mind wandering is controllable affect thought control strategies a...

Daydreaming—engaging in an internal stream of thought unrelated to the here and now—is often linked to creativity; but not all daydreams are creative or lead to creative ideas. To better understand the relationship between daydreaming and creativity, we distinguish between types of daydreaming that differ in style or content (future planning, pleas...

During academic activities, adolescents must manage both the internal distraction of mind-wandering and the external distraction of digital media. Attention training has emerged as a promising strategy for minimizing these distractions, but scalable interventions that can deliver effective attention training in high schools are still needed. The pr...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Perhaps it is no accident that “Eureka” moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Ideas often appear unexpectedly in the human mind, so we must possess some capacity for appraising the idea in order to use it efficiently. Here we describe an account where the feeling of insight plays this adaptiv...

Cognition is dynamic and involves both the maintenance of and transitions between neurocognitive states. While recent research has identified some of the neural systems involved in sustaining task states, it is less well understood how intrinsic influences on cognition emerge over time. The current study uses fMRI and Multi-Dimensional Experience S...

When do people believe that biological explanations, such as genes, brain damage, or abnormal hormones, mitigate punishment for crimes? We propose the way in which biology is viewed as impacting the true self of the actor—who the actor really is, deep down—is the key element for predicting biologically-based mitigation. Across four preregistered st...

Objectives Despite growing evidence demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness for physical and mental health, little is known about the barriers that dissuade individuals from practicing mindfulness. The present study sought to examine the self-regulatory barriers that most commonly prevent mid-life adults from engaging in mindfulness practice.Meth...

Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in “stimulus-independent thoughts”(SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate externalenvironment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven bystimuli in one’s external environment (i.e., stimulus-dependent thoughts; S...

What explanation is there when teams of researchers are unable to successfully replicate already established ‘canonical’ findings? One suggestion that has been put forward, but left largely untested, is that those researchers who fail to replicate prior studies are of low ‘expertise and diligence’ and lack the skill necessary to successfully replic...

Self-regulation is widely considered as a relatively stable trait, and the extent to which it can be improved through training is unknown. This randomized controlled investigation found dramatic and enduring increases in self-regulation among college students, as measured by experience sampling, nightly journaling, and questionnaires. Participants...

Perhaps it is no accident that “Eureka” moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Ideas often appear unexpectedly in the human mind, so we must possess some capacity for appraising the idea in order to use it efficiently. Here we describe an account where the feeling of insight plays this adaptiv...

Artists and scientists have often linked our tenacious tendency to mind-wander or daydream (i.e., think about something other than the here and now) to our ability to generate creative ideas and artistic works. But not all daydreams lead to creative ideas. So what is the relationship between mind wandering and creativity? To answer this question, w...

Some ideas that we have feel mundane, but others are imbued with a sense of profundity. We propose that Aha! moments make an idea feel more true or valuable in order to aid quick and efficient decision-making, akin to a heuristic. To demonstrate where the heuristic may incur errors, we hypothesized that facts would appear more true if they were art...