David Pietraszewski
Trained by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the co-founders of evolutionary psychology, David uses principles of adaptationist thinking to address a range of psychological questions and phenomena.
Past and ongoing work includes establishing the psychological mechanisms producing racial categorization and responsible for representing multi-agent conflict.
New areas of work include exploring the psychology of psychology, including how evolutionary psychology can help us with moving beyond psychology's theory crisis, how it can inform long-standing issues in philosophy of mind such as debates about free will, and how it may allow us to better understand how our intuitive psychology interferes with our attempts to be scientific about the mind.
David is an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, PI of the Cognitive Adaptation Lab, and an affiliate (and sometimes co-Director) of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. He is also co-host of Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast).
University of California, Santa Barbara
@dpietra.bsky.social
Session
Institutional selection dynamics must be removed if we are to end our field’s theory crisis. This talk argues that requiring data concurrent with theory selects for poor theory. The logical implication is that theory and data should be separated in the publication process even more forcefully than they currently are. What appears to be an instance of rigor—demanding data from theory—in fact actively harms rigor, and that as a consequence, the path to theoretical reform runs through stopping this practice. On this account, demands for data are a core reason why theory reform is not happening. Editorial boards, reviewers, funding agencies, and the other stakeholders in our field whose remit is to improve the quality of science must take a side in either perpetuating or exacerbating the theory crisis, and this includes a clear policy on how stand-alone theory will be treated.