Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh

Why do human beings seem drawn to increasingly encompassing explanations while simultaneously resisting the process required to build them?

Human beings do not simply accumulate new beliefs. We appear to construct increasingly encompassing explanations capable of integrating more of our experience into a coherent understanding of the world. Yet inhabiting the space between an explanation that no longer adequately explains our experience and one that has not yet fully taken shape can be one of the most cognitively difficult experiences we face.

Most research explains why people hold particular beliefs. I ask how the explanatory frameworks that organize those beliefs are constructed, become more encompassing, and reorganize our understanding of the world. Explanatory frameworks shape how people learn, interpret evidence, and make sense of the world. Therefore, understanding how they grow and reorganize has implications for political disagreement, scientific reasoning, education, and AI-mediated communication.

Yet because explanatory frameworks are difficult to observe directly, studying them requires new methods. I develop conversational methods for eliciting and measuring explanatory frameworks in real time. These methods make it possible to observe explanatory frameworks as they reorganize in real time and to study the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate—or impede—their growth into more encompassing explanations.