Chapter 8 studies what we can do so that people do not fall into traps of trying to believe in conspiracy theories that resist falsification. Belief in conspiracy theories often starts by looking at important societal authorities and a certain amount of suspicion about these authorities. The chapter examines when conspiracy thinking feels so good that people exaggerate their levels of suspicion of what is actually going on in society. The chapter also explains how the online quality of our modern way of living tends to amplify levels of suspicion and the ease with which conspiracy theories are spread. The chapter distinguishes between three different motivations that often are equated with each other, yet that drive conspiracy thinking in different ways. One important motivation is epistemic and concerns people trying to make sense of what is going on in their world. Another important motivation is existential and concerns people trying to deal with threats in their life. Yet another motivation concerns group identification. This includes people wanting to belong to unique groups that give them a sense of belonging. The three motivations point out different ways of trying to intervene when people start falling for exaggerated suspicion and conspiracy thoughts.

Thinking encompasses a very wide range of phenomena. Chapter 6 first comes back to a study focused on the pleasure of thinking itself. Pleasure is then examined in three modes of thinking: sense-making, reasoning, and daydreaming. Second, as acts of thinking are always situated in specific activities and anchored in various domains of experience, the chapter distinguishes various domains of knowledge: all are complex semiotic systems, culturally mediated, which can be more or less culturally shared and formalised. Third, the chapter examines trajectories of thinking in many systems of knowledge, formal or informal; starting with daily modes of thinking and their pleasures, it examines the pleasures of thinking in professional thinkers before exploring a specific form of sense-making connected to personal experiences. Altogether, this chapter shows that trajectories of thinking are dynamic and that they intermesh elements from a diversity of knowledge systems, moving along various modalities of pleasure.

In order to theorise the pleasure of thinking, this book builds on sociocultural psychology. Chapter 4 first goes back to Lev Vygotsky’s propositions on thinking, which open possible ways to address affects in thinking. In the second part, it explores the work of three contemporary theoreticians, all building a semiotic cultural psychology: Jaan Valsiner, who has developed the Vygotskian heritage into a new and creative semiotic cultural psychology, notably drawing on Charles Peirce and open dynamic system theory; Sergio Salvatore, whose semio-dynamic approach also draws on psychoanalysis; and Yair Neuman, who pursues this dialogue with biology and the sciences in his computational cultural psychology. These innovative, albeit demanding, approaches will give us the elements to build a more integrative theoretical framework in the next chapter.

This chapter advocates further advancing qualitative research methods by creating tools to investigate digital traces of digital phenomena. It specifically focuses on large-scale textual datasets and shows how interactive visualization can be used to augment qualitative researchers’ capabilities to theorize from trace data. The approach is grounded on prior work in sense-making, visual analytics and interactive visualization, and shows how tasks enabled by visualization systems can be synergistically integrated with the qualitative research process. Finally, these principles are applied with several open-source text mining and interactive visualization systems. The chapter aims to stimulate further interest and provide specific guidelines for developing and expanding the repertoire of open-source systems for qualitative research.

This is the general introduction to the Cambridge Handbook of Undergraduate Research. It deals with the history of the university as an institution (which has been a research institution only since the nineteenth century); with the concept of undergraduate research and its dimesions (e.g., student- or staff-initiated research); with possible alternative concepts (e.g., critical thinking or lifelong learning); with research on undergraduate research (e.g., increased retention rate but necessary mentoring); and with implementation challenges (for universities and faculty). We see a new role for students: that in ever more differentiated modern societies, collaborative, cross-segmental knowledge production becomes a new necessity, the educational means to which might be undergraduate research.

In this chapter we discuss the psychological function of “the drive for sense-making,” or our innate desire to make sense of the world. We start by discussing why sense-making generates a drive, similar to those associated with the primary reinforcers of food, water, sleep, sex, shelter, and air. In our account, the drive for sense-making fills a critical gap in purely goal-oriented cognition by motivating us to continue investing in knowledge even when we cannot foresee exactly how it will benefit us. We then examine three different factors that shape the particular form sense-making takes: (1) the practical utility of holding accurate beliefs for attaining concrete goals, (2) the motivational significance of some beliefs, which generates a desire to make sense of the world in a way that feels good, and (3) the impact of computational limitations on the sense-making process, especially our limited ability to explicitly predict what information will turn out to be useful. Finally, we turn our attention to how these factors help to explain aberrant sense-making phenomena such as conspiracy theories, science denial, and political polarization.

Whitman, of course, was the evangelist for first-person subjective experience. In Chapter 3, I argued that understanding should be seen as including a subjective feeling, an emotion, and an objective achievement. Feelings and emotions are characterized as having such properties as valence, strength, and “content.” That content is conferred by an appraisal of the current situation in the light of prior experience; thus, different appraisals evoke different feelings. I will refer to the content of a feeling state as an intuition with “identity conditions” that may be quite different from those for concepts and beliefs.

Chapter 2 – Sense-making analysis – discusses the study’s theoretical and methodological foundations from the perspective of dialogical communication theory and the literature on sense-making resources. The chapter discusses the roles of narratives, framing, categorization and metaphors in sense-making. The book’s different empirical materials are described: peer reviewed research literature, policy documents, international media texts and focus group interviews.

Chapter 6 – Transformation Narratives – discusses narratives of transformations that recur throughout our data sets. We discuss five major ways of conceptualising transformation: as a journey, a building process, a war, co-creation and recuperation. The chapter argues that it is important to unravel core narratives, as they signal different overarching structures in sense-making, connoting different insights into how to address societal challenges.

How can you exist? They qualified this question by saying that, according to statistics, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are severely underperforming in mathematics and yet you, an Aboriginal man, have a PhD in applied mathematics. How can that be? I was perceived as an anomaly: a glitch in the system.