Alexander Noyes

I am a developmental and cognitive psychologist interested in concepts, categories, and the form they take throughout development. I investigate concepts of social entities: Social roles, groups, money, and constructed human kinds. I examine children’s and adults’ intuitive causal beliefs about these entities, and compare them to the more studied domains of natural kinds and artifacts. I also study general theories of concepts and categories, including causal essentialism. I re-evaluate these theories in light of new evidence from social entities.