Sebastian Dieguez

MAGICIAN: Is this your card?

ME: No

MAGICIAN: Is this your card?

ME: No

MAGICIAN: This one?

ME: No. When is our regular postman back from holiday?

Figure 2 in the review: Levels of analysis from genes and brain systems to cognition and behaviour. The child both influences and is influenced by parents through genetically shaped interactions, and by the wider school and social environment. Figure design by Neil Usher. Figure from this review paper: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w23yz_v1

🧩Learning to talk & read isn’t just about effort or teaching—it’s shaped by biology, experience & context

🧠Our new review links genetics, neuroscience, psychology & education to show why some children find language or reading easier.

📖 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🖼️genes→brain→cognition→behaviour 🧵👇

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥

We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪

Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇

open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

Abstract and results summary

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

Disease Externalism AbstractWhen you are ill, where is your illness located? The traditional, and commonsensical, answer is that it is somewhere within your body. But a rapidl

Alex Broadbent's Oxford Handbook of the #Philosophy of Medicine is out now, online at least!

And I'm in it 👇 The rest of it is actually good, though, so don't let that put you off.

academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

New publication! ✨

Remember Jonah Hill asking Sarah Brady to stop modeling to respect his “boundaries”? Or an abusive boss recommending mindfulness after your complaints?

@almagro.bsky.social and I are now ready to tell you when and why therapy-speak might be wrong.

🔓Link in reply

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

New preprint!

"Weapon and Poison: Framing Disinformation in European Commission Speeches, 2016–2024"

osf.io/preprints/so...

Weird, Fantastic, and Fringe: Undergraduate Courses Designed to Teach Critical Thinking Through Refutation Critical thinking is widely accepted as a goal of higher education. However, students are graduating from college with a multitude of false beliefs indicating current strategies are inadequate. We ...

A review of 58 college syllabi that focus on critical thinking showed that these courses often focus on pseudoscience, paranormal claims, and conspiracy theories, relying heavily on active learning methods to help students learn how to separate science from pseudoscience and make better decisions.

Fintan Mallory, Inquisitive Injustice - PhilPapers The ability to control the direction of a conversation, which topics are raised, which questions are asked, and which lines of inquiry are followed, is a basic and powerful form of ...

New paper. TLDR: Social power influence a person’s ability to establish the question under discussion in a conversation. Combining work in formal pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social epistemology can help us identify the mechanisms by which this happens. philpapers.org/rec/MALIIX

Séverine André (ma riante compagne) a encore frappé : nouveau tableau de feutrine. C'est un de mes préférés, il est délicieusement absurde et j'adore la bouille du gamin.

Les quatre sans-cou. Quatre personnages sans cou au bord ou dans une piscine.

Pire hâte des Caraïbes. Un monsieur est tout excité d’aller bientôt en voyage. Sa compagne est en train de finir de faire leur valise.

Allez, en cette période caniculaire, voici les tableaux plus estivaux de la série « Les films auxquels vous avez échappé » réalisée par Séverine André. Un thread 🧵

‘A great awakening of men of action’: What does the ‘right-wing Davos’ represent? - Huw Crighton Davies, 2025 The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite univers...

My new article on the meaning of the Alliance of Responsible
Citizenship is out. Free to read. It’s about the world of ‘radicalising myths’ that this community inhabits. ARC is run by Jordan Peterson & Paul Marshall, & funded from Dubai by Legatum. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

‘A great awakening of men of action’: What does the ‘right-wing Davos’ represent? - Huw Crighton Davies, 2025 The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite univers...

My new article. It was very difficult to make sense of this community’s ideology & contain my analysis in 8k - could easily be a book. Historians could do a much better job of the history. But important to try as these are the backers of GBNews & The Spectator. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

When asked if Jesus “will return to Earth someday,” more than half of all U.S. adults (55%), including three-quarters of Christians, say this will happen. Protestants in the evangelical (92%) and historically Black (86%) traditions are more likely than other Christians to say there will eventually be a second coming of Jesus. Roughly four-in-ten Americans either do not believe Jesus will return to Earth (25%) or say they do not believe in Jesus (16%). Respondents who said they believe Jesus will return to Earth were also asked how certain they are that this will happen during their lifetime. One-in-ten Americans say they believe the second coming of Jesus will definitely or probably occur during their lifetime, 27% are not sure if Jesus will return in their lifetime, and 19% say the return of Jesus will definitely or probably not occur during their lifetime. The proportion of Americans who say they believe Jesus will definitely or probably return during their lifetime is higher among Protestants in the historically Black tradition (22%) and evangelical Protestants (21%), and lower among Catholics (7%) and mainline Protestants (6%). And the share of Black (19%) and Hispanic (14%) Americans who believe that the second coming of Jesus will likely occur during their lifetime is greater than the corresponding share of White, non-Hispanic Americans (8%).

When asked if Jesus “will return to Earth someday,” more than half of all U.S. adults (55%), including three-quarters of Christians, said this will happen.
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Shared Intentionality by Michael Tomasello: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.0c47da2b

🚨New preprint🚨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time

Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves

Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD

Evolving (and co-evolving) the face of a criminal | BPS Charlie D. Frowd, Faye C. Skelton, Cristina Fodarella, Emma Portch and Peter J. B. Hancock share a research journey.

Evolving (and co-evolving) the face of a criminal…

Charlie D. Frowd, @lightfayber.bsky.social, Cristina Fodarella, Emma Portch and Peter J. B. Hancock share a research journey.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Opinion | Civility Is a Fantasy

YES to @roxanegay.bsky.social: In "this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left." #politics #justice #activism

Descriptive statistics about the samples

"Figure 1. Top ten most frequent co-occurrence of Adjectives with ‘rational’ (blue) and ‘reasonable’ (orange) when asked to describe most important characteristics of a person showing sound judgment (Study 1a) / good judgment in a challenging situation (Study 1b). Adjectives are ordered from those most associated with ‘rational’ to those with ‘reasonable.’ Dumbbell nodes represent the percentage of each adjective’s co-occurrence relative to the sum of independent occurrences of each pair of terms."

"Figure 2. Qualities attributed to rational and reasonable persons in Study 1. Color-coded adjectives reflect Analytical, Moral, and Inner Fortitude items (Study 1a)/Agency and Communion factors (Study 1b). Top panels: Estimates from linear mixed model with responses to all characteristics nested in participants, with target order (rational vs. reasonable) as a covariate and false discovery rate correction for multiple testing. Dashed vertical line delineates effects 1 unit above midpoint of the 1–7 scale in Study 1a / half a unit above the midpoint of the 1–5 scale in Study 1b. Bottom panels: Pearson’s correlations and 95% CIs of average scores across items making up each factor. ***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05."

"Figure 3. Top Panel: Preference proportions for reasonable vs. rational agents in social roles. Displays proportions (with 95% CI) derived from logits in generalized mixed models. The dashed line at .50 indicates parity; above this, preference leans towards reasonable agents, and below, towards rational agents. Bottom Panel: Necessity ratings for rationality and reasonableness by role (1–5 rating scale). Shows estimated means and 95% CI. Ratings indicate moderate to high necessity (3–4) for both rationality and reasonableness across rule-based (on the right) and holistic roles (on the left)."

Might the concept of "good judgment" vary by framing or social roles?

Five studies of four nations (🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇨🇳) found some words and roles were more associated with "rational" than "reasonable" (and vice versa).

doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

#CogSci #xPhi #linguistics #dataViz

C’est gentil merci! (On aime aussi les abonnements sonnants et trébuchants, évidemment 😬)

Pourquoi pas! Bon, l’idée serait de gagner des abonnements, pas de couler le journal sous les procès! 😉

C’est vrai, on pourrait faire un effort et ouvrir un compte ici. On va y réfléchir!

I Like Free Speech So Much That I’ve Decided It’s Just Mine Now “President Trump said networks giving him negative coverage may deserve to have their licenses revoked, ramping up threats administration officials...

"I like so many things about free speech. I like that my friends on TV can say they want to kill homeless people and then keep showing up for work like nothing happened."

Beyond the Headlines: Arrest Data and Drivers of Nihilistic Violent Extremism in the Com Network

There has been a fair amount of misunderstanding about what the Com Network is, as well as a misuse of the term “Nihilistic Violent Extremism,” which has become a catch-all in the media and popular culture to describe a complex and ever-evolving ecosystem. 1/ www.maargentino.com/beyond-the-h...

Dans une semaine (le 24 septembre) sortira ce livre écrit à 8 mains, avec @floriancova.bsky.social , @ferrydanini.bsky.social et
@samlepine.bsky.social.

C'est court et n'importe qui peut le lire !
On y discute plusieurs thèmes liés aux pandémies, en éthique et en philosophie des sciences.👇

New Publication! @evanwestra.bsky.social's paper
'Belief in Social Cognition' is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief 🥳 Evan argues that belief plays a modest role, rather than a central role, in everyday social cognition. Abstract here: philpapers.org/rec/WESBIS

New paper with @jowylie.bsky.social and @anagantman.bsky.social on art, morality, and the true self, forthcoming in Cognition! #philsky #psysky