Kara Weisman

Papers

Total Citations

190

H-Index

About

Kara Weisman is a cognitive and developmental psychologist whose research explores how people—both children and adults—understand the mind. Her key research areas include folk philosophy of mind, conceptual development, and the structure of mental life attributions. Weisman’s most influential work, "Rethinking people’s conceptions of mental life" (2017, 178 citations), challenges the dominant experience-agency framework by arguing that it may capture how people distinguish different beings (e.g., dogs, humans, robots, God) but not how they parse mental life itself. This paper has become a cornerstone in debates about the structure of naïve theories of mind. In related work, she developed novel bottom-up methods to track how children’s understanding of mental capacities changes between ages 4 and 9 (2018), and demonstrated that 7–9-year-olds and adults systematically attribute perceptual, cognitive, and affective capacities to different entities (2017). Her research reveals that even young children possess a nuanced, structured folk psychology—challenging assumptions that mental life concepts are either simple or uniformly acquired. Weisman’s work has significant implications for developmental psychology, social cognition, and the study of how humans reason about minds in others, including non-human animals and artificial agents.