Bruce Hood (psychologist)

Bruce Hood
Bruce Hood giving his Why We Fail to Reason & How to Speak Easily talk at QED 2015
Born	Toronto, Canada
Citizenship	British
Nationality	British
Institutions	University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University of Dundee, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	Development of visual selective attention (1991)
Website brucemhood.wordpress.com

Bruce MacFarlane Hood is a Canadian-born British experimental psychologist who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience. He is currently based at the University of Bristol and his major research interests include the cognitive processes behind adult magical thinking.

Bruce Hood completed undergraduate studies in psychology, then received a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Dundee. He received a PhD from University of Cambridge in 1991, studying the visual development of infants. After moving to the USA he took a place as a visiting professor at MIT and faculty professor at Harvard University. He is currently a professor at the University of Bristol, where he conducts research at the School of Experimental Psychology and teaches the Developmental Psychology modules.

In his research, Hood investigates various aspects of cognitive development in children. He is most known for looking at the origins of superstitious beliefs in children. Most notably, his research showed that children inherently prefer 'their' individual objects over duplicated ones, a behaviour which persists into adulthood.

Further, he investigates how children use the gaze to infer about the mental states of humans they are interacting with. Hood also studies how children form theories, for example about gravity and spatial representations.

Hood has been engaging in science outreach since the beginning of his career. In 2006, he appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show Material World and also presented his research at the British Science Association Science Festival later in the same year. Hood argues that humans evolved to "detect patterns in the world" and defines the supersense as the "inclination to infer that there are hidden forces that create the patterns that we think we detect".