OUT OF SIGHT, IN THE MIND: MAKING THE INVISIBLE COGNITIVELY REAL

Abstract

There is a fundamental and important question about human cognition that drives the research projects in this dissertation: How do people cope with things outside of the realm of their direct experience? What is it like for them to cognitively interact with these things? Chapter 1 investigates people’s beliefs about their national communities to understand the extent to which those beliefs were shaped by bias and uncertainty. This chapter takes a perceptual framework to people’s beliefs about their communities by using Bayesian hierarchical analysis on an international dataset to model people’s beliefs about their national demographics (questions like, “what proportion of the population is Muslim”). Chapter 2 aims to understand people’s beliefs about energy, using linear mixed-effects modeling and dimensionality reduction to show how participants rely on tangible cues like size and heat when estimating intangible “energy use” in home appliances. Chapter 3 answers the question “Can people’s thinking be shifted about an abstract, invisible process when that process is made sufficiently concrete to them?” by showing how people understand and value the privacy of their online personal data. This research measures how much people value the privacy of their online personal data and shows that people increase their valuations when they are shown how some of their data might be used to infer more personal information about them. Perhaps the most difficult and yet clear-cut way people wrestle with understanding the ineffable is through their personal religious behaviors. Chapter 4 investigates how a sample of Christians use prayer as a problem-solving strategy. A series of in-depth interviews, surveys, and experiments show that these prayer practitioners view God as a collaborator in their problem-solving process and that prayer reframes the problem at hand in light of their relevant important values.