Change starts with believing that things can be different (with Tamar Kushnir)

What a lovely episode! We began by chatting with Professor Tamar Kushnir about her childhood, her love of math, her academic background, and how she got involved with research in the first place. We then spent some time talking about what it was like training under the world-renowned developmental scientist Alison Gopnik and being surrounded by the likes of Josh Tenenbaum, Dave Sobel, Tom Griffiths, among others. She shares how she dealt with the imposter syndrome that came from that experience but also how working with folks like that was extremely formative for her career.

In the second segment, we turn our focus to one of her recently published papers in Cognition entitled "Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision". That discussion largely focused on how 4- to 8-year-old children believe that others find it is easier to change a weaker belief than a stronger one, but that how all of that depends on the type of belief a person has (e.g., whether the belief moral, social, or factual in nature). Deon and Tamar then have a friendly back-and-forth about whether the findings can be boiled down to associative learning. Tamar makes a convincing case why they cannot (at least entirely).

Links

Li, P. H., Soter, L. K., & Kushnir, T. (2026). Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision. Cognition, 276, 106668. Link