I am a second-year PhD student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow working with Tania Lombrozo at Princeton University. I study how causal reasoning – how people attribute causes to outcomes, events, or beliefs – and moral reasoning – how people decide who, what, and when to morally blame – are intertwined. Specifically, how do people form explanations for why things happen, and what kinds of explanations are viewed as good or preferable? In what ways does this process of forming explanations shape the moral judgments that we make, and vice versa? I study these topics in both adults and children from perspectives of psychology and philosophy.
Publications
How do people explain social change?
Lewry, C., Tsai, G., & Lombrozo, T. (under review). Are ethical explanations explanatory? Meta-ethical beliefs shape judgments about explanations for social change.
Lewry, C., Asifriyaz, S., & Lombrozo, T. (in prep). Intuitive theories of moral progress.
What makes kids and adults curious?
Lewry, C., Gorucu, S., Liquin, E.G., & Lombrozo, T. (2023). Minimally-counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely improbable stimuli. Cognition, 230, 105286. (PDF)
Lewry, C., Curtis, K., Vasilyeva, N., Xu, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2021). Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physics. Cognition, 214,104762. (PDF)
Why do people think humans have a purpose and morally blame them for not fulfilling it?
Lewry, C., Kelemen, D., & Lombrozo, T. (under review). The moral consequences of teleological beliefs about the human species.
Foster-Hanson, E., Lewry, C., & Lombrozo, T. (in prep). Mothers are for breastfeeding: Functional reasoning about gender categories.