127 citations · 161 across the 4 of their papers we have counts for
6 papers
The Natural Selection of Conservative Science
Cailin O'Connor
Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that vario…
Methods, Models, and the Evolution of Moral Psychology
Cailin O'Connor
Why are we good? Why are we bad? Questions regarding the evolution of morality have spurred an astoundingly large interdisciplinary literature. Some significant subset of this body…
Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization
James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O'Connor
Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionizat…
Conformity in Scientific Networks
James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O'Connor
Scientists are generally subject to social pressures, including pressures to conform with others in their communities, that affect achievement of their epistemic goals. Here we ana…
How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policy Makers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks
James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O'Connor, Justin Bruner
In their recent book Merchants of Doubt [New York:Bloomsbury 2010], Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the "tobacco strategy", which was used by the tobacco industry to influen…
Scientific Polarization
Cailin O'Connor, James Owen Weatherall
Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant mode…