Content by Telli Davoodi, PhD

Telli Davoodi, Ph.D. studies cognition over development and across cultures. In one line of research, she studies how children growing up in different religious and social contexts learn about unobservable entities and processes in the domains of religion and science. This research focuses on the role of testimony and information from sources as a common mechanism for learning about the unobservable in both domains of religion and science. In another line of research, she studies the functional role of religious and scientific explanations for existential questions. She investigates the possibility that religious and scientific thinking serve different needs, such as epistemic, social, and emotional. She received her BA in Philosophy from UCLA and an MA in Philosophy from Brown University. Then, she received a Master’s of Education from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard before completing her PhD in Developmental Psychology at Boston University. She did a postdoc at the Graduate School of Education at Boston University, working on how children from three different countries learn about religion and science. Currently, she is a postdoc at the Psychology department at Princeton.