Psychology

In a book titled Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth, Zahid R. Chaudhary, Member (2023–24) in the School of Social Science, brings psychoanalysis to bear on modern culture’s fraught relationship to truth. Chaudhary argues that unconscious mental forces like our fears and memories might also inform attitudes about truth, and that the unconscious plays a role in political-economic processes.

In the cognitive revolution, psychologists, recognizing that developments in information processing had potential for studying the human mind, sought for the first time to apply new ideas in early artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience to psychology. The Institute, as the home of one of the first modern computers, was uniquely poised to serve as a hub for this nascent field of study.