About

Tania Lombrozo is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on addressing fundamental questions about learning, reasoning, and decision-making through empirical methods of experimental psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work is informed by philosophy of science, epistemology, and moral philosophy, as well as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. A significant strand of her research explores the human drive to explain, investigating why humans are compelled to explain certain aspects of their social and physical environment, how the process of seeking explanations influences learning, and how the quality of explanations impacts judgments and decisions. Her laboratory examines whether these explanatory features help achieve epistemic goals or lead to errors in reasoning and decision-making. Other projects in her research address intuitive beliefs about causation, moral responsibility, and the nature of knowledge, involving a blend of descriptive questions about human thought and behavior with normative and conceptual issues from philosophy and psychological theory.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• A computational approach to disentangling the triggers of curiosity in children and adults

  2026-03-28

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  If one important function of curiosity is to foster learning, what does curiosity direct agents to learn? The present research investigates what kinds of situations spark curiosity. Prior work has proposed many candidate triggers of curiosity, but they have rarely been disentangled in a single study. Using a Bayesian model applied to a trial-and-error learning task, we investigated the correspondence between optimal triggers of curiosity (those that maximize learning), heuristic triggers of curiosity (surprise and uncertainty), and participants’ reported curiosity. In Studies 1-2 (N = 848), adults’ curiosity was most sensitive to a “local” optimal trigger: how much would be learned about the immediate target of curiosity. Curiosity was less sensitive to heuristic triggers or a “global” optimal trigger: how much would be learned about broader learning goals. Study 3 (N = 310) showed that curiosity’s sensitivity to local learning was stronger in adults than in 5- to 9-year-olds. These studies suggest that curiosity is heightened by opportunities for learning about immediate targets of curiosity, but not always broader learning goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Judgments of Responsibility for Inequality: A Framework and Review

  Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2026-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Decades of psychological research have led to a better understanding of the factors that influence people's causal explanations of inequalities, such as the racial wealth gap. But our understanding of the psychology of inequality remains limited because this research has largely focused on causal and retrospective judgments. In this article, we argue that two distinctions are valuable for clarifying judgments of responsibility for inequality: the moral-causal distinction and the retrospective-prospective distinction. The moral-causal distinction differentiates judgments of agents' blameworthiness and obligation (moral) from judgments of their contribution to an outcome (causal). The retrospective-prospective distinction differentiates judgments about the agents, actions, and conditions that led to historical or present inequalities (retrospective) from judgments about what agents can or should do to remedy existing inequalities and prevent them in the future (prospective). We summarize existing research on how sociocultural, emotional, motivational, and cognitive factors affect the four categories of judgments defined by this framework. In doing so, we identify important gaps and highlight directions for future research that will allow us to better explain, predict, and shape judgments relating to inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Do Whales Have Hair? Are Whales Mammals? Identifying Synchronic Inconsistencies Among Beliefs

  Underline Science Inc. · 2025-06-18

  otherOpen access

  Inconsistency among beliefs is a hallmark of irrationality. Despite longstanding interest in inconsistency in philosophy and psychology, empirical evidence of synchronically held inconsistencies among people’s belief has proven elusive. Here, across two pre-registered experiments (Ns = 500, 274), we identify inconsistent beliefs simultaneously held by individual participants. Drawing on Sommer et al.’s (2023) proposal that accessibility in memory helps people achieve consistent beliefs, we constructed sets of questions that facilitated or hindered the accessibility of relevant knowledge. Our results support the proposal that consistency is enforced when beliefs are simultaneously accessible, rather than resulting from exhaustive consistency-checking. We find that when participants have simultaneous access to inconsistent beliefs–even regarding inconsequential general knowledge topics–they tend to revise their beliefs toward consistency. Furthermore, we experimentally distinguish an alternative explanation that the inconsistencies we evoked are merely inconsistent responses. Taken together, our results suggest that inconsistency among beliefs may be common, arising when inconsistencies are inaccessible.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Women in Psychological Science

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-27

  articleOpen access

  There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

  PublisherDOI

• Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-01-27 · 22 citations

  reviewOpen access

  The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry (e.g., for 3D protein folding or climate forecasting). In this paper, we reexamine the parsimony principle in light of these scientific and technological advancements. We review recent developments, including the surprising benefits of modeling with more parameters than data, the increasing appreciation of the context-sensitivity of data and misspecification of scientific models, and the development of new modeling tools. By integrating these insights, we reassess the utility of parsimony as a proxy for desirable model traits, such as predictive accuracy, interpretability, effectiveness in guiding new research, and resource efficiency. We conclude that more complex models are sometimes essential for scientific progress, and discuss the ways in which parsimony and complexity can play complementary roles in scientific modeling practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do our theories of moral progress predict whether we vote? Evidence from the 2024 US election

  Underline Science Inc. · 2025-06-18

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Why do people vote—or fail to? We explore whether people’s intuitive theories of moral progress shape their intentions and behavior. Specifically, does believing that human action is the driver of moral progress predict voting intention and actual voting behavior? In Study 1a (N=356), conducted one week before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, participants who endorsed stronger beliefs in human action as necessary for moral progress reported stronger voting intentions, mediated by a greater sense of personal responsibility. Study 1b (N=287), conducted post-election, found that human action beliefs did not directly predict actual voting, but indirectly predicted voting when mediated by responsibility. Efficacy (believing that voting is effective) was the only significant predictor of actual voting. Together, these findings highlight the role of personal responsibility and efficacy in driving voting behavior, with potential implications for the role of lay theories in shaping intentions and behavior more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychological Measurement of Technology Ethics Education using the REGAIN Empirical Framework

  2025-06-06

  article

  Ethics coursework in higher education offers a key opportunity to shift the ethical culture of technology design and development. It could improve anticipation of potential tech harms, increase use of reasoning to address harms proactively, and change how students weigh values against other competing goals within the complex systems of tech companies. Yet, of the empirical measurements that have been developed to assess the effects of tech ethics coursework, most focus only on measuring the quality of students' abstract reasoning, not their ability to foresee problems or their intended strategies to address them in complex environments. Here we draw on evidence from the human psychology of belief and behavior change to develop a new framework for measuring the effects of tech ethics coursework. Our REGAIN framework assesses how students Reason about ethical decisions, Evaluate their own ethical decision-making, prioritize ethical Goals and values, become Aware of ethical dilemmas, acquire ethically-relevant Information, and perceive social Norms around ethical behavior. We describe the psychological research informing how we operationalize these constructs in the current framework, and we report a study<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup><sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>This work involved human subjects in its research. Approval of all ethical and experimental procedures and protocols was granted by Princeton University. using this framework to measure the effects of a course on tech ethics at a research institution in the United States. Though we cannot draw conclusions about causation, our data suggests that students who completed a tech ethics course showed higher moral awareness of potential tech harms compared to a control condition. Tech ethics students also differed in their reasoning strategies and metacognitive judgements, and they reported stronger intentions to seek diverse perspectives and prioritize society's goals more than their own goals as developers.

  PublisherDOI

• A computational approach to disentangling the triggers of curiosity in children and adults

  2025-08-07 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  If curiosity is the engine of learning, what does it direct agents to learn? The present research investigates what kinds of situations spark curiosity. Using a Bayesian computational model applied to a modified multi-armed bandit task, we investigated the correspondence between optimal triggers of curiosity (those that maximize learning potential), heuristic triggers of curiosity (surprise and uncertainty), and participants’ reported curiosity. In Studies 1-2 (N = 848), we found that adults’ curiosity was most sensitive to “local” learning potential (the extent to which information would shed light on the immediate target of curiosity). Curiosity was less sensitive to “global” learning potential (the extent to which information would contribute to broader learning goals), uncertainty, or surprise. Study 3 (N = 310) showed that curiosity’s sensitivity to local learning potential strengthened between ages 5 to 9 years and adulthood. Together, these studies suggest that curiosity tracks opportunities for learning, especially those that support learning about immediate targets of curiosity rather than broader learning goals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How aggregated opinions shape beliefs

  Nature Reviews Psychology · 2025-01-06 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• What motivates individuals to engage in collective action? Moral responsibility, not causal responsibility, drives voting

  2025-05-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Why do people engage in collective behaviors (such as voting) for which their individual, causal contribution is likely to be negligible? We examined whether human action beliefs (i.e., believing that moral progress is caused by human actions) predict voting behavior and whether this relationship is mediated by moral responsibility (do I have a moral obligation to vote?) and causal responsibility (does my vote make a difference?). In Study 1a (N = 356), conducted one week before the 2024 US presidential election, we found that human action beliefs predicted voting intentions, and this relationship was fully mediated by responsibility. In Study 1b (N = 287), conducted one day after the election, human action beliefs predicted actual voting only indirectly via responsibility, and moral responsibility, not causal, drove this effect. Study 2 (N = 935) replicated these results, again finding that moral responsibility, but not causal responsibility, predicted voting. In Study 3 (N = 309), we experimentally manipulated moral and causal responsibility in a hypothetical election. Moral responsibility, but not causal responsibility, predicted voting intentions. Across our studies, both observational and experimental, moral responsibility emerged as the strongest and most consistent psychological predictor of voting behavior, regardless of whether individuals felt that their vote would make a difference. These findings suggest that promoting a sense of moral responsibility might be key to increasing voter turnout and other forms of collective action. They also suggest the theoretical importance of differentiating moral and causal notions of responsibility.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Understanding the Role of Explanation in Cognition

  NSF · $551k · 2011–2018

• The Development of Structural Thinking about Social Categories

  NSF · $579k · 2017–2019

• The Development of Structural Thinking about Social Categories

  NSF · $498k · 2018–2022

• The Role of Explanation in Causal Reasoning and Categorization

  NSF · $204k · 2008–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph Jay Williams

  University of Toronto

  23 shared

• Emily Liquin

  New York University

  17 shared

• Alison Gopnik

  University of California, Berkeley

  15 shared

• Azzurra Ruggeri

  Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging

  15 shared

• Caren M. Walker

  University of California, San Diego

  13 shared

• Thomas L. Griffiths

  13 shared

• Nadya Vasilyeva

  Princeton University

  12 shared

• Casey Lewry

  Princeton University

  12 shared

Awards & honors

• Harvard University Ph.D.