Thursday, April 21, 2022

8:30am to 4:25pm

Madison Ballroom B (Level 4)

Organizers:

Azzurra Ruggeri, Samuel Ronfard, Joshua Rottman, Andrei Cimpian, Candice Mills

Speakers include:

Lisa Fazio, Simona Ghetti, Pearl Han Li, Jamie Jirout, Tamar Kushnir, Tenelle Porter, David Sobel,
Michal Reifen Tagar, Caren Walker, Andrei Cimpian, Candice Mills

REGISTRATION: Completely free for everyone. Breakfast, lunch, coffee, and snacks will be provided. To register for the preconference, please select it when registering for the main CDS meeting.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: We welcome poster submissions from researchers at all career levels. Submissions can include published or completed projects, as well as studies in progress. Presenting the same research in both the preconference and the main conference is allowed. To submit, please send a brief abstract (max 150 words) to Azzurra Ruggeri, ruggeri@mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Submission deadline: February 21. Decisions will be announced by February 28.

PRECONFERENCE DESCRIPTION

The Internet has made learning new content faster than ever: You can now ask your questions to Google—in the same way you would ask questions to your mother, teacher, or nerdy best friend—and get answers in an instant. However, this does not necessarily make finding the information one is looking for easier: One has to know what kinds of questions to ask, how to ask those questions effectively and reliably, how to filter and interpret the results one obtains, and how to use this information to determine when querying should stop.

Epistemic curiosity and reasoning (i.e., the desire to resolve uncertainty about the world, as well as the competence in doing so) and intellectual humility (i.e., the disposition to recognize the fallibility and limits of our knowledge and to appreciate alternative perspectives) are both crucial to this process, and may have a strong impact on our learning at the individual and at the societal level.

In this sense, fostering and supporting these competencies is of immense interest to parents, teachers, and policymakers alike. Among other benefits, developing strong epistemic reasoning skills and virtues could be the antidote for the hyper-polarization of beliefs, one of the most vexing challenges our society is facing, engendered by the information age and the advent of fake news. Extreme polarization undermines the possibility of productive compromise and can eventually lead to gridlock.

This pre-conference workshop aims to stimulate interest in taking a cognitive developmental perspective on children’s epistemic attitudes, and to foster a rich interdisciplinary dialogue. With this goal, the pre-conference will bring together an international group of developmental, cognitive, educational, and political psychologists at different career stages who have adopted diverse methods and theoretical frameworks to advance our understanding of epistemic reasoning and intellectual humility in childhood.