Research
For drafts of papers under review or works in progress, please email me! I am happy to share anything that is in a sharable state, and happy to chat about anything that’s not.
Publications
Journal Articles:
Soter, L.K., Berg, M.K., Kross, E., & Gelman, S.A. (2025). How peer relationships influence adolescents’ reasoning about theft-based moral transgressions. Developmental Psychology. [penultimate]
Soter, L.K. (2025). A defense of back-end doxastic voluntarism. Noûs. [penultimate] [published]
Soter, L.K., Ramirez, V., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2025). U.S. Citizens’ judgments of moral transgressions against fellow citizens, refugees, and undocumented immigrants. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes.
Soter, L.K. (2023). Acceptance and the ethics of belief. Philosophical Studies. [penultimate] [published]
Soter, L.K., Berg, M.K., Gelman, S.A., & Kross, E. (2021). What we would (but shouldn’t) do for those we love: Universalism versus partiality in responding to others’ moral transgressions. Cognition. [published]
Boutyline, Andrei, & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural schemas: What they are, how to find them, and what to do once you’ve caught one. American Sociological Review. [published]
Nordbeck, P. C., Soter, L. K., Viklund, J. S., Beckmann, E. A., Kallen, R. W., Chemero, A. P., & Richardson, M. J. (2019). Effects of task constraint on action dynamics. Cognitive Systems Research. [published]
Putnam, A. L., Ross, M. Q., Soter, L. K., & Roediger III, H. L. (2018). Collective narcissism: Americans exaggerate the role of their home state in appraising US history. Psychological Science. [published]
Book Chapters:
Soter, L.K. (Forthcoming.) “Belief’s Guidance Function: Mechanisms, Control, and Categorization on the Output-side of Belief.” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief, eds. Neil van Leeuwen and Tania Lombrozo. [penultimate]
Under review (email for drafts):
A paper on epistemic partiality in friendship, arguing that recasting the debate in terms of acceptance (as opposed to belief) avoids a variety of anti-partialist worries. [R&R]
Studies investigating whether people think we have obligations to ourselves. (with Susan Gelman and Fan Yang) [R&R]
Papers in (various stages of) prep:
“What could a process model of belief look like?”
“How (not) to think about bad believers” (with Shanna Slank)
“Evidence for cognitive control mechanisms in a belief-suppression task” (with Chandra Sripada, Alex Weigard, Mike Angstad, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)
“Competing perspectives on ‘belief’ in the ethics of belief”
“Investigating children’s theory of belief change” (with Pearl Li and Tamar Kushnir)
“Relational influences on young children’s moral judgments” (with Yeonjee Bae, Susan Gelman, and Felix Warneken)
I have ongoing studies on moral partiality across development, the moralization of mental states & beliefs about mental state controllability, belief suppression and cognitive control, intergroup dynamics and moral cognition, and kids’ reasoning about belief change. I’m also working on various philosophical projects, including projects on the relationship between my account of acceptance and other prominent accounts in the ethics of belief, developing a model of belief, how we should think about blame for bad mental states, and the relationship between beliefs and emotions.
