Experimental projects

Most of my experimental projects are about the nature and formation of belief states - the dynamics of doubt, belief, acceptance and trust. They are epistemologically grounded in the study of the notion of reasonable doubt that I have carried out these last years (see Vorms & Hahn 2019), and they themselves ground my epistemological criticism of cognitive biases (Vorms 2021) and how they may (or may not) explain some social phenomena such as spread of misinformation, (ungrounded) mistrust (Vorms et al 2022, Vorms 2020), and some conspiracy theories (Huneman & Vorms 2018). One fundamental concern I have is whether and how the stakes of a decision that an agent must make impacts on their information processing and assessing (both in terms of relevance and credibility) and on their belief formation. 

My experimental projects are all collaborative. Here are three ongoing studies, the first results of which have been presented in conferences, and for which papers are in preparation. The first two of them make use of legal settings (where participants are put in the position of jurors in criminal trials having to bring a verdict).

The first one, which I am carrying out with Dr Jens Koed Madsen and Prof Ulrike Hahn, is aimed at testing and refining the pragmatic explanation of the so-called ‘dilution effect’, whereby irrelevant information provided to an agent mitigates the impact of relevant (or diagnostic) information on the formation of belief. One key issue we are studying is the impact of the perceived credibility of the source of relevant / irrelevant information on how participants use it.

Second, a long-term project since my Marie Curie fellowship has been to test and criticise, both from an epistemological and psychological point of view, the so-called ‘story-model’ of jurors’ reasoning and decision-making (first proposed by Pennington and Hastie - see Vorms & Lagnado 2019). In an ongoing study, carried out with Prof Katya Tentori, Prof David Lagnado, and Dr Saoirse Connor Desai, we test the effects of disjunction on jurors’ decision-making (ie we test whether being presented with two incompatible but both incriminating stories makes jurors likelier to convict or to acquit).

Together with three fellow philosophers (Dr Denis Bonnay, Dr Isabelle Drouet and Prof Anouk Barberousse), we test the effects of the varying formats of asking belief questions (graded, categorical, subjective, objective), as a way to inquire into the nature and format of basic belief states.