This paper examines how misinformation shapes vaccine refusal, even while maintaining doubt towards false claims. Exposure to misinformation can alter one's perceptions of a vaccine's rare side effects and the perceived credibility of authoritative sources. When individuals are uncertain about vaccine safety, these changes can lead them to refuse vaccination. We use the expected utility framework to show that such refusal, while shaped by misinformation, can still be an instrumentally rational response under uncertainty rather than a cognitive failure. We identify three mechanisms through which misinformation influences decision-making: (1) erosion of trust in authoritative sources, (2) heightened emotional responses to anecdotal risks, and (3) a combination of relatively modest shifts in both trust and side-effect perception. Our model highlights the irreversible impact of misinformation and underscores the need for proactive interventions, such as pre-bunking and media literacy, to counter its effects.

I argue that a bounded Bayesian who already maintains a high credence in a scientific claim can nonetheless be rationally required to suspend categorical belief about it when the claim is politically salient. I develop a framework for managing awareness growth grounded in expected epistemic utility: a bounded agent should expand their space of possibilities with respect to a proposition if and only if the expected accuracy gain from potential learning justifies the cognitive cost of expansion. I show that a socially aware agent is rationally compelled to expand their awareness differently for politically salient and non-political scientific claims. Using a partition-dependent probabilistic account of belief, I then show that this difference in awareness is sufficient to justify believing non-political claims while suspending judgment about politically salient ones, even when credence in both is equally high.

Social movements are fundamentally moral phenomena: they arise from perceived injustices and demand moral responses from potential participants. We argue that this moral character has strategic implications that standard models of social movements, which treat them as instances of the collective action problem, overlook. Research in moral psychology shows that individuals differ in their modes of moral reasoning. Because of these differences, the moral framing an activist chooses shapes how potential participants respond: those whose mode of moral reasoning matches the framing are more likely to be persuaded, while those whose reasoning mode is mismatched may remain unpersuaded or actively resist the message. We develop a rational choice framework that models potential participants as moral reasoners and analyzes the activist's strategic choice between deontological and consequentialist framing. The activist is uncertain about the distribution of moral reasoning types among potential participants. The framework generates two hypotheses: (1) deontological framing is more effective in early-stage movements, when emotional intensity is high and deep commitment is essential, while consequentialist framing is more effective in later-stage movements that require broader coalitions; (2) among consequentialist appeals, non-welfarist framing (emphasising justice and structural outcomes) is more effective than welfarist framing (emphasising well-being) at generating the expectation structures necessary to sustain participation. These hypotheses can be tested by future empirical research on movement communication strategies.

The continued influence effect (CIE) is a well-documented phenomenon whereby misinformation continues to affect people's beliefs even after they receive and accept a correction. Standard explanations attribute CIE to cognitive limitations or irrational tendencies. This paper demonstrates that CIE can occur even for ideally rational Bayesian agents, suggesting that the phenomenon is not merely a product of flawed reasoning but can arise from the structure of our informational environment. We model both misinformation and corrective information as testimony from sources that are not fully trusted. To formalize partial trust, we develop an account of defeater propositions within Bayesian epistemology. We distinguish two types of defeaters: inaccuracy (the source is careless or unreliable) and indeterminacy (the source is manipulative or deceptive). While uncertainty about inaccuracy defeaters permits standard conditionalization, uncertainty about indeterminacy defeaters does not: the rigidity condition fails, requiring an alternative updating method that we introduce and develop. Corrective information takes two forms: undercutting corrections target the source of misinformation (claiming it is inaccurate or insincere), while rebutting corrections directly contradict its content. We show that an ideal Bayesian can experience CIE after receiving either type of correction. This occurs even when the agent trusts the corrective source more than the source of misinformation: because neither source is trusted completely, both leave their mark on the agent's credences. We also show that timing matters for undercutting corrections about source manipulation: receiving such corrections before exposure to misinformation can prevent CIE in belief entirely, while corrections received afterward cannot.

Decision making under uncertainty about members of demographic groups who are subject to negative stereotypes paves the way for a conflict between our moral and rational obligations. On one hand, we feel morally obliged to resist using demographic statistics about these groups in our decision making, as it can lead to behaviour that reinforces oppressive social practices against the group. On the other hand, we feel rationally obliged by the principle of total evidence to use all the evidence available to us, including demographic statistical evidence. In this paper, I argue that the conflict is avoidable for a bounded Bayesian, because a bounded agent, unlike an idealised one, has a genuine decision to make about whether to engage with a piece of evidence at all. I first offer a model for how a bounded Bayesian should make this decision: whether to engage with a piece of evidence and update their credence on it. I then use that model, together with Babic's model of updating on noisy statistical data, to show why such an agent has rational grounds to ignore stereotype-aligned demographic statistical evidence, and hence to avoid the conflict between morality and rationality. Finally, I show how the result extends to agents who are not statistically literate enough to appreciate the upshot of Babic's model.

This paper discusses the pragmatics of probabilistic statements about social groups. I use Grice's cooperative principle to argue that statistical reports about social groups whose content is aligned with a salient social stereotype implicate essentialist and causal claims about those groups, and thereby contaminate the common ground of the conversation. I also show how, in certain policy-making conversational contexts, reporting a statistical correlation can implicate an intervention that reinforces oppressive social practices. Finally, I discuss how Gricean cancellation cannot mitigate these harms.

Longtermists claim that preventing human extinction should take priority over preventing near-term harms, and they explain this by appealing to the vast number of future people affected. This paper challenges that explanation by designing a thought experiment, structured as an interventionist causal test, that contrasts the extinction case with the choice between revolution and reform under a corrupt government. I show that when the catastrophic nature of the outcome is removed while scale and ambiguity are held fixed, the clarity of the longtermist preference weakens. This establishes that the catastrophic nature of extinction, not merely its scale, is a causal contributor to the longtermist intuition, with significant implications for the scope of longtermist recommendations.

Demographic profiling is usually discussed at the level of belief. Ross (2022) argues that profiling beliefs are intrinsically at odds with social equality, which is why an egalitarian should suspend judgment about whether a given person has some esteem-relevant trait, and why profiling is objectionable even when no action is at stake. We argue that the same worry arises one level down, at the level of credence, and that a bounded Bayesian has the resources to address it. For a bounded agent, forming a credence about a specific individual is not automatic. When the agent already holds a credence in a relevant proposition, such as a demographic base rate, forming a new credence about the individual requires fine-graining their partition and judging how the new proposition bears on what they already believe, while respecting probabilism. This is costly, and where it is costly the agent has a genuine liberty: they may decline to form the credence at all. We call this suspension of credence. We show when this liberty obtains, why demographic profiling is an instance of it, and that the relevant cases divide in two. Where no concrete decision about the individual is in prospect, social egalitarian values are enough to justify suspending credence about random members of a demographic group. Where a concrete decision is in prospect, egalitarian values alone are not enough, because they come into conflict with the instrumental demand to act well. For that second case we point to work in preparation by Tohidi, which shows that in the most pressing instances, where a decision is in prospect and the statistics align with a negative stereotype, an agent can honour both demands without suspending credence, by declining to update the individual-level credence on the demographic evidence.