Barbara Spellman

She also contributed to a National Academies Report on lessons for intelligence analysis from the behavioral and social sciences (2011).

Barbara Anne ("Bobbie") Spellman is a professor of law and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Trained first as a lawyer, then as a cognitive psychologist, her work spans the two fields. As an academic psychologist, Spellman's research was in memory and higher order cognition (analogical, inductive, and causal reasoning). She also was involved early in the Open Science movement, mostly in her role as editor in chief of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science from 2010-2015. As a legal academic, her work includes co-authoring "The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law" with Michael J. Saks. She currently advocates for psychological science, and for science generally, as a fellow and member of the steering group of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has over 7,500 citations.

Spellman was an early advocate for Open Science. During her tenure as editor of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (2010–15), the journal published over 100 articles related to the movement to reform science. Her final editorial, “A Short (Personal) Future History of Revolution 2.0” has been cited frequently as an introduction to the reform movement. She was involved in creating the TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion) Guidelines, published in Science, which describes how journals can introduce practices to improve science, and she has often spoken publicly about those solutions.

In the late 2000s, Spellman realized that law — both academic and as practiced — had become more sympathetic toward research from Psychological Science. She has described this appreciation as coming from two directions: (1) the mounting DNA exonerations showing that factors psychologists had worried about for years (e.g., bad eyewitness testimony; false confessions) had indeed contributed to wrongful convictions; and (2) the influence of economics on law, and the following influence of psychology on economics.

Spellman's work on analogy, mostly with her advisor Keith Holyoak, is best known for the article: “If Saddam IS Hitler then Who is George Bush?” (JPSP, 1991). It uses real life current events (the first Persian Gulf War) to examine the importance of knowledge and flexibility in analogical mapping. She is also known for an early paper that advanced the idea of “Analogical Priming” (M&C, 2001). Unlike most people who work on causal reasoning, Spellman wrote about both single-event causal reasoning and multiple-event contingency-causal reasoning (what she loosely refers to as: reasoning in law vs reasoning in science). “Crediting Causality” (1997, JEP:G), based on her dissertation, formed the groundwork for later papers with implications for views of legal causation. Her work on multi-event causation illustrated limitations on reasoning about the independent effects of two causes on one outcome (as might be seen in Simpson's paradox).

Spellman was born on September 30, 1956, in New York City. Her family later moved to Roslyn, New York, where she graduated from Roslyn High School in 1974. In 1979, she received her B.A. degree from Wesleyan University (see List of Wesleyan University people). In 1982, she received her J.D. degree from New York University School of Law. In 1993 she received her Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive psychology. She is a member of the American Contract Bridge League and won several local and regional events during the 1980s.