Philip Petrov

My research is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, criminal and tort law, and moral and political theory. Well-intentioned citizens often disagree about legal and policy questions such as how to allocate scarce medical resources (in health policy), how to regulate risk-creating conduct by private enterprises (in tort law), and how to assign legal punishments (in criminal law). In my research, I use tools from cognitive and social psychology to better understand why citizens often arrive at substantially different conclusions about questions like these. In a variety of important cases, moral and political disagreement can be partly explained by people’s use of different mental models or cognitive representations of the underlying decision problem. In a time of substantial political division, it may help us to consider how interpersonal differences in cognition contribute to several of the disagreements that we observe in law, policymaking, and the political sphere more broadly.