Faculty profile


Charles Kalish

Charles Kalish

Dept. of Educational Psychology
1057 Educational Sciences
(608) 262-0840

cwkalish@wisc.edu
Links: Department, Lab, Personal

Research Keywords

inductive inference, categorization, social cognition, development, culture & cognition

Affiliations

  • Department of Educational Psychology - Learning Sciences & Human Development, Professor
  • Waisman Center, Study of Children’s Thinking
  • Department of Psychology, affiliate

Current Projects

  • Director, Study of Children's Thinking project
  • Co-organizer, Cognitive Development Research Group

Research Collaborators

Representative Classes

Research Statement

My research focuses on inductive inference and causal reasoning—how do we predict the future and learn from experience? One line of research focuses on how children acquire the set of commonsense beliefs that characterize adult thinking. I am particularly interested in children's developing appreciation of physical and intentional causality. Current research explores the role of norms in social cognition. How does children's understanding of rules and obligations develop, and what role does such understanding play in predicting and explaining people's behavior? A second line of research addresses more general processes of categorization and inference. We explore how people use evidence to make category-based inductions, and how beliefs about the nature and origins of categories affect learning and judgment.

The ability to generalize past experience to new situations, to make inductive inferences, is central to what we think of as learning. We want children not just to be able to solve familiar problems, but also to know how to apply their knowledge in new circumstances. I hope that studying the process of generalization will tell us more about how children learn.

Selected Publications

  • Kalish, C.W. (2002). Children's Predictions of Consistency in People's Actions. Cognition, 84, 237-265.
  • Kalish, C.W. (2002). Essentialist to some degree: The structure of natural kind categories. Memory & Cognition, 30, 340-352.
  • Kalish, C.W. (2000). Children's thinking about truth: A parallel to judgments of social domains? In M. Laupa (Ed.), Rights and wrongs: How children and young adults judge the world, New Directions for Child Development, No. 89, 3-18, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Kalish, C.W. (1998). Reasons and causes: Children's understanding of conformity to social rules and physical laws. Child Development, 69, 706-720.
  • Kalish, C.W. (1997). Children's understanding of mental and bodily reactions to contamination: What you don't know can hurt you but cannot sadden you. Developmental Psychology, 33, 79-91.