My Publications.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles:

Oktar, K., Lombrozo, T., & Griffiths, T. (2024). Learning from Aggregated Opinion. (Accepted at Psychological Science)

• If 4 people think something is true, and 14 think it is false, what is the likelihood that it is true? People’s answers to this problem match a Bayesian model’s predictions well; better than alternative heuristics from epistemology and economics.

Oktar, K., Sucholutsky, I., Lombrozo, T., & Griffiths, T. (2024). Unpacking Divergence and Misalignment in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. (Accepted at Decision).

• Is disagreement a difference in beliefs, or is it a misalignment in worldviews? We formally define and relate both, and discuss how not taking alignment into account can lead to ineffective, or backfiring, interventions.

Oktar, K., Lerner, A., Malaviya, M., & Lombrozo, T. (2023). Philosophy instruction changes views on moral controversies by decreasing reliance on intuition. Cognition, 236, 105434. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105434

• Does moral reasoning play a role in shaping moral judgments? Recent research suggests it does not. Yet we find that a moral philosophy course can change students’ views—especially those students who relied most on their intuitions initially.
• Best Poster Prize at SPP 2023

Oktar, K. and Lombrozo, T. (2022). Deciding to be authentic: Intuition is favored over deliberation when authenticity matters. Cognition, 223, 105021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105021

• Why do we make romantic and financial decisions differently? For romance, deliberation seems awkward—imagine doing a linear regression on someone’s features—for finance,relying on intuition seems strange. This is because people think some decisions (e.g., romance) should reflect their true selves, and that this notion is related to intuition.
• In Top 10 Most Downloaded Articles on Cognition, Spring 2022

Oktar, K., Laura, Z., & Leticia, S. (2019). Impact of Increasing Levels of Difficulty on the Generation Effect. Koc University Undergraduate Psychology Journal , 4(18), 12-17

Journal Articles Under Review:

Gottlieb-Cohen, S.*, Oktar, K.*, & Lombrozo, T. (2022). Deciding when we cannot know: First-person priority in transformative choice. (Manuscript Under Review at Open-mind).

Pre-prints:

Sucholutsky, I.,* Muttenthaler, L.,* Weller, A., Peng, A., Bobu, A., Kim, B., Love, B. C., Grant, E., Groen, I., Achterberg, J., Tenenbaum, J. B., Collins, K. M., Hermann, K. L., Oktar, K., Greff, K., Hebart, M. N., Jacoby, N., Zhang, Q. (Richard), Marjieh, R., Geirhos, R., Chen, S., Kornblith, S., Rane, S., Konkle, T., O’Connell, T. P., Unterthiner, T., Lampinen, A. K., Müller, K.-R., Toneva, M., & Griffiths, T. L. Getting Aligned on Representational Alignment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13018

Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings:

Oktar, K. and Lombrozo, T., (2022). Mechanisms of Belief Persistence in the Face of Societal Disagreement. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society.

• Marr Prize for Best Paper

Malaviya, M., Sucholutsky, I., Oktar, K., and Griffiths, T. (2022). Can Humans Do Less-Than-One-Shot Learning? Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society.

Oktar, K. and Lombrozo, T., (2021). Deciding to be Authentic: Intuition is Favored Over Deliberation for Self-Reflective Decisions. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society.

Oktar, K. and Lombrozo, T., (2020). You Should Really Think This Through: Cross-Domain Variation in Preferences for Intuition and Deliberation. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society.