Research
I ask how social norms and beliefs influence the representation of abstract concepts over development. Some examples of my research interests include the following topics:
Please also check out my OSF page.
The Unobservable
How do children come to learn about and represent supernatural beings like God, unobservable scientific concepts like germs, or abstract entities like the mind?
This is an interesting question given that, at least for young children, belief in things they cannot directly observe seems to amount to trust in what they are told or, more generally, in the practices and beliefs of their communities. I have recently published a theoretical paper on this topic here.
I study the development of beliefs about the existence of unobservable, supernatural beings, scientific entities, and the mind in different societies. Relatedly, I'm interested in how religious and scientific cognition may be related for adults in cultures with varying degrees of sociopolitical emphasis on religion and science.
Selected publications on this topic:
Davoodi, T., Jamshidi-Sianaki, M., Payir, A., Cui, Y. K., Clegg, J., McLoughlin, N., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2023). Miraculous, magical or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation. Memory & Cognition, 51.
Davoodi, T., & Clegg, J. M. (2022). When is cultural input central? The development of ontological beliefs about religious and scientific unobservables. Child Development Perspectives.
McLoughlin, N., Cui, Y. K., Davoodi, T., Payir, A., Clegg, J. M., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2023). Expressions of uncertainty in invisible scientific and religious phenomena during naturalistic conversation. Cognition, 237.
Davoodi, T., Cui, Y. K., Clegg, J., Yan, F., Payir, A., G., Harris, P. L., Corriveau, K.H. (in press). Epistemic justifications for belief in the unobservable: The impact of minority status. Cognition.
Davoodi, T., Sianaki, M. J., Abedi, F., Payir, A., Cui, K. Y., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2019). Beliefs about religious and scientific entities among parents and children in Iran. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10, 847-855.
Davoodi, T., Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2016). Distinguishing between realistic and fantastical figures in Iran. Developmental Psychology, 52, 221- 231.
Cui, Y.K., Clegg, J., Yan, F., Davoodi, T., Corriveau, K.H., Harris, P.L. (in press). The Power of Religious Testimony in a Secular Society: Belief in Unobservable Entities among Chinese Parents and Their Children. Developmental Psychology. Payir, A., Davoodi, T., Cui, K. Y., Clegg, J. M., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. (2020). Are high levels of religiosity inconsistent with a high valuation of science? Evidence from the United States, China and Iran. International Journal of Psychology.
McLoughlin, N., Davoodi, T., Cui, Y. K., Clegg, J. M., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2021). Parents’ beliefs about their influence on children’s scientific and religious views: Perspectives from Iran, China and the United States. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 21(1-2), 49-75.
religious & Scientific explanations
When we think about questions like how the universe came to exist or what happens after we die, what are the underlying psychological needs that may motivate these questions?
We may actually be curious about the objective truth about what happens after death, for example, or we may simply be anxious about what happens. Depending on which need we try to satisfy, religious or scientific explanations may be more appealing, salient, or relevant in the process of inquiry.
By asking about the psychological functions of religious explanations for existential questions and comparing it to that of scientific explanations, I hope to gain insight into the functional role of religious cognition and draw comparisons with scientific cognition.
Publications on this topic:
Davoodi, T., & Lombrozo, T. (2023). Scientific and religious explanations, together and apart. Book chapter in Jonah Schupbach & David Glass (Eds.), Conjunctive explanations: nature, epistemology, and psychology of explanatory multiplicity.
Davoodi, T., & Lombrozo, T. (2020). Explaining the existential: functional roles of religious and scientific explanation. To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Blog posts on this topic:
Existential comfort for nonbelieversTalking to the gods in difficult times
The mystery of believing without a causal story
Short video presentation on this topic:
prepared for CogSci 2020Visit also my OSF page for a repository of explanations generated online by U.S. adults for existential questions. This is a rich data set that can be used by interested researchers to ask questions about explanatory frameworks.
Social Essentialist Beliefs
Do features like race, gender, nationality, or socioeconomic status determine who people inherently are and will be forever?
You may think "yes, to some extent", "no, not at all", or "it depends on which feature we are talking about". These answers represent various degrees of a bias, named social essentialism - the idea that social categories are indicative of inherent, unchanging, and defining characteristics of their members.
I study the cultural and cognitive mechanisms responsible for the development of social categorization and how it influences our reasoning about interactions between people.
Publications on this topic:
Shahbazi, G., & Samani, H., Mandalaywala, T., Borhani, K., & Davoodi, T (revise/resubmit). The development of social essentialist reasoning in Iran: insight into biological perception, cultural input, and motivational factors (submitted to JEP: General Special Issue on Learning Diversity).
Shahbazi, G., & Samani, H., Mandalaywala, T., Borhani, K., & Davoodi, T. When do generics lead to social essentialism: developmental evidence from Iran (invited registered report for Infant and Child Development Special Issue on Cross-Cultural Replicability and Generalizability in Developmental Science).
Davoodi, T., Soley, G., Harris, P. L., & Blake, P. R. (2020). Essentialization of social categories across development in two cultures. Child development, 91, 289-306.
Soley, G., & Davoodi, T. The development of essentialist reasoning based on gender, race and language in a sample from Turkey. Psikoloji Çalışmaları, 41(1), 279-300.
Blog post on this topic:
What do social categories indicate to children?
Ownership
Who has a stronger claim over the bananas? The worker, who picks the bunches (right) or the owner of the land (left)?
Given ever-increasing economic and social inequalities in many modern societies, a relevant and important question is how people reason about who owns what and who should own what.
I study the development of reasoning about ownership as a continuous attribute (i.e. strength of claim) in different cultures and plan to extend this work across cultures and disciplines.
Publications on this topic:
Davoodi, T., Nelson, L. J., & Blake, P. R. (2020). Children's conceptions of ownership for self and other: Categorical ownership versus strength of claim. Child development, 91, 163-178.