CORY JANE CLARK

Research Interests

Social Cognition, Judgment & Decision Making, Bias, Conflict, Metascience

I study the human quest for truth and our remarkable ability to sabotage it with emotion, ego, and selective reasoning. Human cognition didn’t evolve to be an impartial judge of reality. It evolved to help us survive in social groups: to avoid ostracism, gain status, and persuade others of our loyalty and moral virtue. Although humans care about truth and accuracy, we’re also biased toward winning social approval.

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Lately, my focus has been on motivated cognition in evaluations of science by both the public and scientists themselves. For example, I’ve found that scientists who believe controversial conclusions are empirically true are more likely to self-censor and more fearful of peer punishment. This suggests that professional discourse (and perceived scientific consensus) may be systematically biased toward rejecting socially undesirable findings—not necessarily because they’re wrong, but because they’re costly to say out loud.

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On the more applied side, I am interested in finding ways of de-biasing science and expediting truth discovery. Over the past five years, I’ve worked with Professor Philip Tetlock to promote adversarial collaborations, research procedures in which disagreeing scholars jointly design studies to test their competing hypotheses. Because both sides are motivated to avoid methods that would favor their opponent’s conclusion, the result is often more rigorous and credible science. And sometimes, these collaborations even turn intellectual adversaries into friends. Learn more about our initiative here.

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You can read most of my publications here.