Dr. Celniker will present his talk Partisans are biased, but are they rational? on Monday, November 6^th at 11am in AF 201

Dr. Jared Celniker earned his PhD in social psychology from the University of California, Irvine. His research on political and moral judgment has been published in top academic journals and has been covered in news outlets like The New York Times and The Economist. He has also written about behavioral science for popular press venues such as Scientific American. He is currently a research director at Arizona State University, where he leads interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of epistemology and social psychology. 

Abstract: Why is it so difficult for political partisans to come to a shared understanding of the world? In this talk, I will discuss my recent work showing that partisans engage in motivated reasoning in their evaluations of scientific evidence, which impedes social consensus on contentious issues. However, while this research shows that partisans are not impartial information processors, this does not necessarily mean that partisans are irrational information processors. Disentangling descriptive and normative models of political judgment (i.e., what partisans think vs. what partisans "should'' think) reveals some challenges to "giving debiasing away" in the political context, and I will discuss the implications of this work for reducing both lay and expert evaluative biases. I will conclude by reflecting on how my experiences at Chapman University, where I earned my Psychology BA and participated in the University Honors Program, have shaped my research approach and passion for interdisciplinary collaboration.