BSc, University of Toronto (2015)
MA, University of Toronto (2016)

I am interested broadly in what it means to understand and to think well, and have been applying this to the study of stereotyping: how social categories are used to understand and make inferences about other people. In particular, I have been focused on what Bayesian cognitive models tell us about how to ideally use social categories if one’s goal is to be as accurate as possible, and when and why people might fail to do this. I am also interested in how these epistemic ideals and errors relate to the moral aspects of stereotyping (e.g. what happens when using a stereotype leads to more accurate but morally worse inferences?).

Contact Thalia here.

Selected Publications:

Vrantsidis, T. H., & Cunningham, W. A. (accepted). The Effect of Knowledge about a Group on Perceived Group Variability and Certainty about Stereotype-Based Inferences. Social Cognition. [preprint]

Vrantsidis, T. H. & Cunningham, W. A. (2020). The Effect of Knowledge about a Group on Perceived Group Variability and Certainty about Stereotype-Based Inferences. In S. Denison., M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B.C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2509- 2515). Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]