ana gantman

Resistant Beliefs, Responsive Believers - Volume 122, Issue 4, April 2025 Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capaciti...

In this finally out (!) paper, I argue no—and cognitive science backs this up. We can keep the orthodox rationalist view of belief *and* recognize the difficulties in changing minds. The key is thinking of belief as requiring a *capacity* (not a reliable disposition) to respond to evidence.

🥂 officially promoted to associate prof of psych at brooklyn college & the CUNY grad center--and appointed in the philosophy department at the grad center 🥂

I have a new paper on "The Psychology of Virality" with @steverathje.bsky.social

We explain how similar psychological processes (eg preferential attention to negativity, social motives, etc.) drive the spread of information across online and offline contexts: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A now-classic experiment from Kevin Tobia found an effect of morality (becoming morally worse vs. becoming morally better) on intuitions about personal identity

A new study now looks at that effect across a variety of different cultures

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Paperback version of Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy.

Table of contents for the volume.

Now out in paperback! Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy. Very glad to have put together such a stellar lineup of contributors. #philsky

people would be more likely to say that the boss is more responsible than the employee, willed the actions of the employee, AND participants also say that the actions of the boss are teleological (like most human action) but the actions of the employee are mechanistic!

so for example, when we experience our thought preceding our action like a little preview, we are more likely to feel like the experience of conscious will, or the feeling of action authorship. we thought similarly if the orders of the boss directly precede the actions of the their employee

we used Wegner's Theory of Conscious Will to help us think about cases where we are more and less likely to think that the mind (or for us, the boss) wills the body (or for us, an employee or the workforce) and we expected it would be exactly in these cases that the metaphor would be most apt

we tend to see the "head" or leader of the company as responsible when the company does something bad, the more the corporation-body metaphor is apt

we suggest that people metaphorize a company as a single person with a mind and a body, and bc we tend to assign blame to people who make decisions more than people who carry them out (see eg www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)

so the word 'corporation' comes from the latin 'corporatio' meaning "having taken bodily form" and in a new paper @gfloresrob.bsky.social nirupika sharma and i interrogate this corporation-body metaphor and its implications for how we think about blame wrt corporate wrongdoing osf.io/preprints/ps...

Honored to receive this award, which @anagantman.bsky.social also received! Go PsyPhi Lab! 👽

Collage of award winners

Congratulations to the Graduate Center’s Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser Awards winners: @anagantman.bsky.social, Qiushi Guo, Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides, @mattlindauer.bsky.social., Sarah Ita Levitan, and Vladimir Rosenhaus! www.gc.cuny.edu/news/six-cun...

congratulations, dr! 🍾🎉

Congratulations, Dr. @gfloresrob.bsky.social 🌟🧠🥳 so proud of you! And so jealous of your future mentors at princeton!

great thread on our working paper on the role that pursuits besides moral goodness--specifically aesthetic or intellectual ones--play in access our feelings that we are our free and authentic selves

love working with these two @jowylie.bsky.social @mattlindauer.bsky.social

Academic research focuses so obsessively on morality, but people also care deeply about other parts of life

(Lou Reed might not have been a moral exemplar, but we might think he was an exemplar of something else)

This @jowylie.bsky.social paper explores this other side of people’s values

Fun thread on our recent work looking at the contributions that non-moral forms of value, such as aesthetic value, make to our lives. @jowylie.bsky.social @anagantman.bsky.social

so so proud of @gfloresrob.bsky.social who will be a post-doctoral fellow in psychology and public policy at Princeton in Fall '25! so happy for you and your lucky new adviser and students too ❤️🤩

Our paper in Nature (@mkwittmann.bsky.social et al.): the brain does not only process the *identity* of a person but primarily our *relationship* to them. Even on a neural level, who someone is *in relation to others* is key. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #neuroskyence

#psychscisky #cognition #socpsyc #philsky

In sum, people do indeed think women are morally better than men, in part because of their perceived and expected dedication to community and care, core components of moral goodness.

This last study also gets at an important consequence: equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men.

Finally, we use a novel impression updating task to explore a potential consequence of this phenomenon. Specifically, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men because it is seen as less statistically normative.

Further, using a large database of 1,864 normed behaviors, we find that behaviors associated with moral goodness are also stereotyped as feminine.

Next, using a novel profile-generation task, we find that people are more likely to ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they are spontaneously thinking of a woman (vs. a man) and when they are assigned to do so.

Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face.

Decades of scholarship on gender have shown that women are judged to be more caring and more communal than men--a core component of moral goodness. We used multiple methods (N= 5,376) to test a basic claim: People think that women are morally superior to men.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Are women morally wonderful? Excited by this paper, with
@jowylie.bsky.social, @anagantman.bsky.social, @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social, Peter Mende-Siedlecki, and Heleni Singer.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

@curtispuryear.bsky.social a study of a decade of twitter posts shows and new measure of moralization shows that moralization has substantially increased over time (d = .45!). Driven by both self selection and within-user increase over time! #comppsych #spsp2025 (also stay tuned for this paper😎)