I am very thrilled that one of my first philosophy papers was just accepted for presentation at a conference later this year!

Here is the abstract:

Beliefs Are a Package Deal – Abstract

Learning about the mechanisms of stereotype and prejudice development can help us increase our awareness of the social, as well as cognitive, influences on our beliefs and other mental states. This awareness, in turn, can help us counteract these influences on our behavior. In this paper, I will integrate research from social psychology with theories from philosophy to present belief packages, which combine consciously and nonconsciously held beliefs with nonconceptual mental states. These packages form a powerful foundation for stereotypes and prejudices such as singlism and couplemania, stereotypes that can drive people into marriage without questioning potentially negative consequences of this social institution. A critical examination of the belief packages can help us explain why undesirable messages in children’s games are not innocent but rather need to be questioned and avoided. Belief packages can also address the questions of generation and reduction raised within the priming literature. Belief packages can be a theoretical approach to the generation problem. System justifications, which form another part of the package, allow us to tackle the reduction problem by how they influence which culturally sanctioned goals we pursue.

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