Last week, the CORE lab grad students, postdoctoral researcher, lab coordinator, and Dr. Coley, had two entire days devoted to a research summit. The purpose of the summit was to continue discussions surrounding theoretical and operational definitions for important concepts that run through many of the projects within the lab, such as psychological essentialism and anthropocentrism. Consistency in these definitions is important for maintaining high quality research. As such, one of the goals of the summit was to determine new effective measures of psychological essentialism and anthropocentrism, and their consequences, symptoms, and implications.
During the summit, CORE lab members read a variety of literature and exchanged valuable ideas, from the theoretical to the practical. Discussions about philosophers such as John Locke enriched and guided measurements and analysis of raw data, and helped improve coding strategies that are so important in the field.