Shira Elqayam

Shira Elqayam is Professor of Cognitive Psychology & Cognitive Science at De Montfort University, affiliated with the School of Applied Social Sciences within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. Her research critically examines the role of normativity in human reasoning and decision-making, advocating for a descriptivist approach over normativist frameworks.

Her research interests center on higher cognitive processes, particularly reasoning, decision-making, rationality, dual-process theories, disjunctive thinking, and the linguistic aspects of inference. A major focus is the critique of normativism—the idea that human cognition should be judged against normative standards—highlighting methodological flaws such as the 'is-ought' inference. Her empirical work explores how people infer normative conclusions from descriptive premises, influenced by causal links and outcome valuations.

Shira Elqayam’s recent publications reveal a strong focus on the interplay between logic, probability, and human judgment. Her work spans conditional reasoning, moral cognition, clinical decision-making, and the psychology of rationality. Trends in her research include challenging normative models in psychology, developing alternative theories like Grounded Rationality, and exploring the mechanisms behind inferential connections in conditionals.

• Keynote speaker at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the New Frameworks of Rationality Program (2017)
• Associate Editor, Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science and Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
• Guest editor for special issues in Thinking & Reasoning and Frontiers in Cognitive Science
• Regular and ad hoc reviewer for leading journals including Cognition, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Synthese

She has secured significant research funding, including a Leverhulme Trust grant on the generative capacity of norms and grants from the Experimental Psychology Society and EURO-XPRAG. She supervises PhD students, including Ashleigh Jeffries, and collaborates with prominent scholars such as David Over, Jonathan Evans, and Valerie Thompson. She has organized international workshops and convened symposia at major conferences, contributing actively to the global academic community in cognitive science and psychology.