Dr Kirsten Blakey

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Psychology Stirling

Dr Kirsten Blakey

Contact details

About me

I am an Honorary Senior Researcher at the University of Stirling and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. My research focuses on the development of intellectual humility and how children and adults revise their beliefs and learn from disagreement.

Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Stirling, where I worked on a UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project "Agency, Rationality and Epistemic Defeat", exploring the origins of human rational thought by looking at how human infants, dogs, and pigs form and revise beliefs, and whether these non-linguistic populations are capable of reflective belief revision.

I completed my PhD in Developmental Psychology and MSc in Child Development at the University of Stirling, supervised by Professor Christine Caldwell, where my PhD research focused on the socio-cognitive mechanisms thought to underlie distinctively human cumulative culture. I also hold a BSc in Applied Psychology from Heriot-Watt University.

I study the development of social cognition, with a particular focus on how children evaluate, learn from, and interact with others. My research investigates how they revise their beliefs in response to different types of evidence, learn from disagreement, and develop metacognition, reflective thinking, intellectual humility, prosocial sharing, and social learning.

Outputs (13)