Philosophy doesn’t just attract good thinkers. It helps make them. A new study of more than half a million college grads by @M_Prinzing and @daft_bookworm shows that philosophy majors stand out for reasoning skills, curiosity, and open mindedness. 👇 https://t.co/JN4QXY416m

Of course it's not as strong as a randomized experiment, but we think this is really striking evidence that philosophy does make people better thinkers! The open-access paper is now available in the @APA_Journal! https://t.co/kxfGZ4CH1L 4/4

We found that philosophy students outperformed all others on verbal and logical reasoning as well as habits of mind controlling for baseline differences, when students were freshman. 3/4

@daft_bookworm and I analyzed data from over half a million college students, looking at tests of verbal, logical, and mathematical reasoning, plus self-report measures of valuable habits of mind (a mix of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual rigor, etc.) 2/4

A popular and very old argument for the value of philosophy claims that studying philosophy cultivates important intellectual abilities and dispositions. But empirical evidence for that claim has been hard to come by. Until now! 1/4

Not only did the GPT-ratings correlate very strongly with the human-ratings; they also showed equivalent correlations with the other measures. That is, GPTs don't just do better than older automated methods. They perform just as well as humans! https://t.co/ElZBkcAdxz

My collaborators and I had participants write short essays and complete self-report and behavioral measures of spirituality. Then, GPTs and research assistants scored the essays, indicating how spiritual the participants were.

Some really cool studies (e.g., by @steverathje2) have found that #GPT models outperform old methods for automated text analysis, where performance = correlation with human raters. But how do GPTs compare with the human raters themselves, especially in sophisticated tasks?

I had a great time talking with @am_richardson25 and @daft_bookworm about how #Philosophy can make people better thinkers! https://t.co/dTH41jVYB3

Listen to the newest episode today:

So excited to talk with my friends @daft_bookworm and @M_Prinzing about intellectual virtues. This is a good one! Check it out when it drops next week!

Can environmentally friendly actions boost personal well-being? Listen to this week's #UndertheCortex with @M_Prinzing to learn how a sustainable lifestyle offers profound benefits. #Sustainability https://t.co/JKq8UAqAOd

Feeling down today? Research suggests that doing something good for the Earth might cheer you up! @OGurcanl and I discuss some of this work in the latest episode of Under the Cortex @PsychScience https://t.co/rTUGkRyqyY

Shoutout to @xphilosopher @tobigerstenberg!

It also seems that people treat certain entities as having a special kind of authority over certain purposes. E.g., people think the owner of an artifact has some authority over its purpose and that supernatural beings have authority over sacred objects.

When attributing purpose, people seem to use the same criteria whether they're thinking about artifacts, social institutions, body parts, animals, sacred objects, or human lives.

Is the purpose of a life at all related to the purpose of a knife? They seem totally different. Yet, 3 large experiments (total N = 13,720) revealed a striking degree of similarity in purpose judgments across domains https://t.co/VDzxX5OBQh

This figure highlights philosophy's distinctiveness. The measures have funny names, but "Habits of Mind" assesses things like curiosity, intellectual rigor, and intellectual humility; "Pluralistic Orientation" assesses tolerance of diverse opinions and open-mindedness.

This suggests that philosophy attracts people who are already rigorous, careful thinkers, but also trains people to be better thinkers. Thanks to @apaphilosophy for their support this project! https://t.co/NKlI9s1cVx

In freshman year, Phil majors are more inclined than other students to support their views with logical arguments, consider alternative views, evaluate the quality of evidence, etc. But, Phil majors *also* show more growth in these tendencies than students in other majors.