Tania Lombrozo
Tania Lombrozo is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Lombrozo directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab, where she and her students study aspects of human cognition at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including the drive to explain and its relationship to understanding, various aspects of causal and moral reasoning and all kinds of learning.
Lombrozo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER award, a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformational Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science. She received bachelors degrees in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. Lombrozo also blogs for Psychology Today.
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Born 450 years ago, Galileo remains an effective teacher today. Commentator Tania Lombrozo, for one, says his work illuminates the capacity of simple human thought to make sense of the world.
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Last week's debate on evolution vs. creation attracted millions of viewers. Commentator Tania Lombrozo takes on Ken Ham's assumptions about science and belief.
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Communicating science inevitably involves a trade off between brevity and nuance. Commentator Tania Lombrozo confronts the dilemma with a 140-character challenge.
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Dozens of thinkers have been asked to identify cherished scientific ideas that are ripe for retirement. Commentator Tania Lombrozo considers their answers and ends up questioning the wisdom of discarding worn-out scientific ideas.
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Feeling "watched" by secret Internet agents hoping to sell you new shoes can be disturbing. But commentator Tania Lombrozo suggests that it isn't this loss of privacy, per se, that makes personalized Internet advertising distinctly unnerving.
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We're steeped in symbols. Yet we often take symbols and their power for granted. A new competition puts the spotlight on their role in human thinking. And commentator Tania Lombrozo puts a spotlight on the competition itself.
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Do science-based jokes exclude the uninformed, or open doors to understanding a mysterious culture? A recent compilation of such in-jokes prompts commentator Tania Lombrozo to take a poke or two at the psychology of humor.
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Hoping to incorporate some celebration of science into this year's festivities? Commentator Tania Lombrozo offers three unusual suggestions for spicing up your Christmas holiday.
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Few people have even a rudimentary understanding of the mechanisms driving global warming. Do you? Commentator Tania Lombrozo would like to introduce you to a new resource that makes it easy to grasp the basics of climate change.
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Students around the country are gearing up for final exams, including often-disparaged multiple choice tests. Is their bad rap deserved? Commentator Tania Lombrozo looks at some research suggesting it's not.