Is poking the cat causal? (with Jonathan Kominsky)

Candy, Deon, and Jonathan open this episode by talking about #kindscience. For example, should scientist even worry about being kind? What does #kindscience even look like? And is it even possible to be kind to other scientists if your theoretical perspective is at odds with their own? In the second half of the episode, Jonathan talks about his work in Psychological Science on an understudied, but important, aspect of infant causal perception—namely, their sensitivity to certain physical constraints on causal events. Candy, Deon, and Jonathan then go back and forth about whether infants' sensitivity to these constraints is innate and what the mechanism may be that support such sensitivity.

Links

Kominsky, J. F., Strickland, B., Wertz, A. E., Elsner, C., Wynn, K., & Keil, F. C. (2017). Categories and constraints in causal perception. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1649-1662. Link to paper