Research
For drafts of papers under review or works in progress, please email me! I am happy to share anything that is in a sharable state, and happy to chat about anything that’s not. For a full research statement expanding on the projects below and their connections, please email me.
Publications
Peer Reviewed:
Soter, L.K. (2024). A defense of back-end doxastic voluntarism. Noûs. [penultimate] [published]
Soter, L.K. (2023). Acceptance and the ethics of belief. Philosophical Studies. [penultimate] [published]
Soter, L.K., Berg, M.K., Gelman, S.A., & Kross, E. (2021). What we would (but shouldn’t) do for those we love: Universalism versus partiality in responding to others’ moral transgressions. Cognition. [published]
Boutyline, Andrei, & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural schemas: What they are, how to find them, and what to do once you’ve caught one. American Sociological Review. [published]
Nordbeck, P. C., Soter, L. K., Viklund, J. S., Beckmann, E. A., Kallen, R. W., Chemero, A. P., & Richardson, M. J. (2019). Effects of task constraint on action dynamics. Cognitive Systems Research. [published]
Putnam, A. L., Ross, M. Q., Soter, L. K., & Roediger III, H. L. (2018). Collective narcissism: Americans exaggerate the role of their home state in appraising US history. Psychological Science. [published]
Invited:
“Belief’s Guidance Function: Mechanisms, Control, and Categorization on the Output-side of Belief.” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief, eds. Neil van Leeuwen and Tania Lombrozo.
Under review (email for drafts):
A paper on epistemic partiality in friendship, arguing that recasting the debate in terms of acceptance (as opposed to belief) avoids a variety of anti-partialist worries.
When the epistemic chips are down, what ought we believe about our friends? I offer an intervention into the epistemic partiality debate, proposing that what we really owe our friends in target cases is not belief, strictly speaking, but acceptance—understood as suppressing an unwanted belief state’s characteristic role of guiding cognition, reasoning, and action.
Studies investigating whether people think we have obligations to ourselves. (with Susan Gelman and Fan Yang) [R&R]
Across four studies we investigate how people think about obligations to the self. We show evidence that people widely endorse this category, and that people do not think obligations to the self reduce to mere personal preferences or obligations to others.
Studies on adolescents’ responses to witnessing close vs. distant others committing moral transgression. (with Martha Berg, Ethan Kross, and Susan Gelman) [R&R]
In two studies, we investigate how adolescents respond to the wrongdoing of close vs. distant others. We find that adolescents say they both actually would and morally should preferentially protect close others who commit even serious moral transgressions, and that their motivations appeal to both practical outcomes for themselves and their peers, and direct considerations of morality.
Studies on how US citizens respond to moral transgressions against fellow citizens, refugees, and immigrants. (with Victoria Ramirez and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)
Across five studies, we show that US citizens judge transgressions against refugees and undocumented immigrants to be more wrong than those committed against fellow citizens. We explore perceived vulnerability as a potential mechanism, and propose that this challenges the standing assumption that people always show ingroup favoritism in moral judgment.
Papers in (various stages of) prep:
“What could a process model of belief look like?”
“How should we think about bad beliefs?” (with Shanna Slank)
I have ongoing studies on moral partiality across development, the moralization of mental states & beliefs about mental state controllability, belief suppression and cognitive control, intergroup dynamics and moral cognition, and kids’ reasoning about belief change. I’m also working on various philosophical projects, including projects on the relationship between my account of acceptance and other prominent accounts in the ethics of belief, developing a model of belief, how we should think about blame for bad mental states, and the relationship between beliefs and emotions.
