Ariella ShulmanUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Ariella Shulman is a senior pursuing a degree in Philosophy.

Her thesis, titled “Freed from our Biases: Increasing Agency Through Flexible Habits,” examines the contemporary free will debate through the lens of pragmatist philosophy and behavioral psychology. Her thesis considers how implicit racial bias is a sociogenic factor complicating agential access to free will, and discusses how lessons from cognitive psychology, pragmatic theory, and Critical Race Theory can be excellent tools in deconstructing the apparent fatality of bias. Her analysis aims to show that we can produce free agential decisions that oppose socially constructed biases.