Fall 2024: Dr. Simon Cullen

The Office of the President and the Division of Inclusion, Equity, and Community were pleased to host the inaugural Engaging Across Viewpoints Lecture Series presented by Dr. Simon Cullen. In his talk, Beyond civility: Honing reason to create safe spaces for dangerous ideas, Dr. Cullen, explained how he set out to test a 165-year-old hypothesis in the psychology of reasoning and ended up teaching a viral philosophy class called Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society.

Using live polls and student data, he explored the effects of self-censorship on academic freedom and the contradictions implicit in how students often think about speech and education. Finally, he shared practical, easy-to-use tools backed by empirical research and his own classroom experience to help us reach beyond mere civility: to understand, discuss, and evaluate controversial arguments more deeply and with less bias.

Simon Cullen is an Assistant Professor and Dietrich College AI and Education Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching combine philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning, communication, and understanding across moral and political divides. His work has been published in Science Advances, Cognition, Nature Science of Learning, and the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. He has a background in ethics, moral psychology, the psychology of reasoning, and the philosophy of cognitive science, and he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.