Kara Weisman's personal website
[email: kgweisman at gmail] [cv: pdf] [Google Scholar: profile]
I study folk theories and their role in shaping people’s behaviors, relationships, and experiences. I am particularly interested in the ways in which conceptual representations do and do not vary across development, across cultural settings, and across individuals.
I am currently a researcher in the Conceptual Development Lab at foundry10. From 2020-2025 I was the postdoctoral project director for the Developing Belief Network.
I study folk theories and their role in shaping people’s behaviors, relationships, and experiences. I am particularly interested in the ways in which conceptual representations do and do not vary across development, across cultural settings, and across individuals. Much of my work focuses on the ways in which folk theories shape people’s experiences, attitudes, and behaviors; recent topics include concepts of the mind and body, spiritual experiences, vaccination attitudes, and parent-child conversations about race.
Most of my work takes the form of behavioral studies with 3- to 10-year-old children and surveys with adults. I am especially interested in applying “bottom-up” analysis approaches to exploring and quantifying similarities and differences in concepts across groups of people, such as people of different ages, or people from different cultural settings.
I recently joined the Conceptual Development Lab at foundry10 as a researcher, collaborating closely with Dominic Gibson on studies of children and their parents/caregivers.
I am also one of the inaugural members of the Developing Belief Network (PIs: Rebekah Richert, Univeristy of California, Riverside, Department of Psychology; Kathleen Corriveau, Boston University, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development). From 2020-2025 I was the postdoctoral Project Director for the network. I helped lead the development of the network and the design of our study protocols, and supported participating research teams during the first three waves of data collection (which included over 2000 children and their caregivers, from 47 distinct cultural-religious groups spanning 19 countries). For the open-access study protocols for our first and second waves of data collection, see our protocol paper in PLOS ONE and our recent preprint.
Since 2016, I have been one of the core researchers on the Mind & Spirit Project (PI: Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University Department of Anthropology), which explores how people in different cultural and religious settings conceptualize “the mind” and how that shapes their spiritual experiences. Over the course of several years, our team of anthropologists and psychologists employed a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to work with adults and children from many religious traditions located in urban and rural field sites in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. For our initial ethnographic observations, see our special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; for quantitative findings from the project, see our articles in PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, and Topics in Cognitive Science.
I also collaborate with Kathryn Humphreys (Vanderbilt University), J. Nicky Sullivan (Impact Justice), Steven O. Roberts (Stanford University), Derek Powell (Arizona State University), and Ellen Markman (Stanford University), on projects related to discovering, modeling, and intervening on lay theories to effect behavior change by way of conceptual change, with a focus on parents and caregivers (see recent articles in Open Mind and JEP: General).
I completed my Ph.D. in psychology in 2019, working primarily with Ellen Markman and Carol Dweck, followed by postdoctoral research with Tanya Luhrmann and Rebekah Richert.
I grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts. Before graduate school, I worked as a research assistant for Elizabeth Spelke in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (2011-13); as a research coordinator for the Preschool Relationships Enhancement Project and the Effective Classroom Interactions MOOC at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (2011-13); and as the first lab manager of Kristin Shutts’ Social Kids Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2009-11). I graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Cognitive Science in 2009, where I worked with Kristina Olson (Department of Psychology), David Ross (School of Medicine), Tamar Szabó Gendler (Department of Philosophy), Woo-Kyoung Ahn (Department of Psychology), and Teresa Treat (Department of Psychology).