Zara Anwarzai - research

My research interests fall into a few different categories.

For a full list of works in progress, presentations, and other details relevant to my research, send me an email.

skill & expertise

This is the part of my research program I'm currently most focused on. I'm interested in the social dimension of skill and expertise. I look at how our standard debates about skill and expertise (e.g., is action-guiding knowledge propositional or not? are the cognitive mechanisms involved in skill automatic or controlled?) change when we focus on skills which are deployed in pairs, groups, or in some other important social context.

I'm also interested in the metaphysical and scientific nature of skill and expertise. What does it mean to act as an expert? How is skill different from expertise? Can artificial agents be capable of genuine expertise?

papers in this area:

Does effort matter for skill? in Synthese (2025)

these are currently or soon to be under review, so email me for drafts or preprints:

a paper on one-dimensional accounts of skill
a paper on what social skills are
a paper on what it means to act as an expert
a paper on the proper level of analysis for social skilled action

toolmaking

I have a broad interest in the evolution of human cognition. During my doctoral work, I was a member of the Brain Evolution Lab at Indiana University. We conducted an fMRI study on the neurocognitive bases of stone toolmaking. We're interested in differences in neural activation across levels of experience, across different lithic tool types (Oldowan, Acheulean, Levallois), and also across different toolmaking events (platform preparation, percussion, etc.). We're also interested in whether these findings support the hypothesis that language and technology co-evolved.

Shelby Putt (Illinois State University), Tom Schoenemann (Indiana University), and I are currently processing this data and preparing it for publication.

We also have a theoretical paper on the evolution of compositionality and combinatoriality in the International Journal of Primatology (2024).

social interaction

I am interested in the nature of social interaction at different scales, from dyads to social institutions such as universities and states. I think about this topic from the perspective of philosophical work in social ontology and from work in cognitive science on collective behavior.

Within social ontology, I am interested in the role of collective intentionality in explaining nonideal social phenomena. While some have argued that collective intentionality obscures our ability to understand harmful social dynamics and institutions, I argue that it makes these things more salient. I think collective intentionality plays a critical role in our explanations of collective political actions.

I am currently preparing a paper on this point for submission.

Within cognitive science, I am most interested in the way 'collective intelligence' gets used to describe a wide range of collective behaviors, from group problem-solving to wisdom of crowds-type phenomena. I'm interested in what, if anything, these behaviors have in common such that they might be involve or demonstrate collective intelligence.

My work in this area is part of a multidisciplinary collaboration with researchers at different institutions, including Ketika Garg (California Institute of Technology), Cody Moser (Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique), Hannah Dromiack (Arizona State University) and Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez (National Autonomous University of Mexico).

papers in this area:

an empirical paper: The causal role of synergy in collective problem-solving (currently under review, this is a preprint)
a theoretical paper on collective information processing (currently under review, email me for a draft)

cognitive harm in the workplace

Workplaces are strange places. I worked as a union organizer and learned this first-hand. There's a decent amount of work on the psychological harms associated with workplaces, but few focus on those harms as distinctively cognitive. I'm interested in how employers and managers manipulate and redirect attention and perception to create fear and uncertainty in the workplace.

This project is in its very early stages of development.

The photo on the left is of me standing by The Millenia, a sculpture in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico by Mathís Lídice made in 2001. It depicts the origins of life and the passage of time. The photo on the bottom right is of me in Berlin.