![]() ![]() He also argues that secular superstitious beliefs do predispose humans to religious beliefs. However, Hood clearly differentiates between secular and religious beliefs, where secular supernatural beliefs are universally applicable across cultures and religious beliefs are culturally specific. For instance, he argues that essentialism is beneficial to social interactions, since it allows humans to overcome objectification and attribute uniqueness to other humans. Ĭontrary to prominent skeptics such as Richard Dawkins, Hood is convinced that superstitious beliefs are inevitable and even beneficial to humans. Hood argues that humans evolved to "detect patterns in the world" and defines the supersense as the "inclination to infer that there are hidden forces that create the patterns that we think we detect". The book tackles how the human brain generates superstitious beliefs. In 2009, he published his first popular science book SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Hood has been engaging in science outreach since the beginning of his career. Modelled after the successful Psychology and the Good Life course initiated by Laurie Santos at Yale University, the programme has been shown to improve mental well-being and is the basis for the BBC podcast The Happiness Half-Hour co-presented by Hood. Since 2018, Hood has been delivering the Science of Happiness course at University of Bristol as well as other universities and organizations. Further, he investigates how children use gaze to infer about the mental states of humans they are interacting with. Most notably, his research showed that children inherently prefer 'their' individual objects over duplicated ones Ī behaviour which persists into adulthood. He best known for discovering a naïve theory of gravity and looking at the origins of superstitious beliefs in children. In his research, Hood investigates various aspects of cognitive development in children. He is currently a professor at the University of Bristol, where he conducts research at the School of Psychological Science and teaches the Developmental Psychology modules. After moving to the US he took a place as a visiting professor at MIT and faculty professor at Harvard University. He received a PhD from University of Cambridge in 1991, studying the visual development of infants. Hood completed undergraduate studies in psychology, then received a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Dundee. ![]() He is currently based at the University of Bristol and his major research interests include intuitive theories, self identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind adult magical thinking. University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University of Dundee, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technologyĭevelopment of visual selective attention (1991)īruce MacFarlane Hood is a Canadian-born British experimental psychologist and philosopher who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience. ![]()
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