Corey Cusimano

Excited by our new work estimating the empowerment of LLM-based agents in text and code. Empowerment is the causal influence an agent has over its environment and measures an agent's capabilities without requiring knowledge of its goals or intentions.

The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle Where were you when you first learned about implicit bias?

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

New letter by @minzlicht.bsky.social and I forthcoming in TiCS on whether neurometabolic costs are necessary to explain cognitive fatigue. While the origins of fatigue may turn out to be metabolic, we argue there isn’t yet sufficient evidence for such theories. osf.io/preprints/ps...

That's just two possibilities. There are a ton of others that my coauthors and I have thought about.

But we haven't actually tested entitlement in students yet. Do either of those possibilities resonate with you? Or, do you have any other ideas?

Or, maybe these students don't *really* feel entitled to a higher grade, they just think they can *get* one by appealing to effort. When I show these kinds of students how much better other students performed relative to them, they typically drop their appeals.

One thing that might be going on is that students who work hard think that their performance actually is better than the teacher says it is. (After all, overachievers are used to their hard work resulting in high performance.) So, the appeals could be about performance (deep down).

Hi Dave! I totally share your intuition here. It is possible that students feel differently about their grades than adults feel about, e.g., pay and bonuses.

But, maybe the student case isn't such a clear counter-example either. I'm curious what you think:

When we started, we expected the opposite results: Hard work marks us as virtuous. Achievement, even though it creates value for others, is often a product of luck.

Our intuitive sense of entitlement may not care about how lucky we are, only whether we succeed at the work we do for others.

These findings were robust!

Workers paid themselves based on outcomes (not effort) even when they knew that others weren't working as hard as they were.

We also replicated this result across cultures who, in other surveys, appear to differ in the value of hard work and achievement.

We gave online workers short jobs to do. We varied how much effort the job induced, and how good a job the workers could do on it.

We then let workers choose their bonus for their work (which we then paid them).

Workers paid themselves based on how good they did, not how hard they worked.

What makes people feel entitled to rewards—the effort they put into their work or the outcomes they achieve?

Out now in PNAS; with Jin Kim and Jared Wong:

Achievement.

Effort seems to matter very little (if at all).

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind.

The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵

Really proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social.

We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…

Our incredibly short (5 page) paper on intuitions about consent — with Joanna Demaree-Cotton and @rosesomm.bsky.social

We find cases where people agree that both:

(a) There’s a sense in a which a person clearly consented

(b) In deeper sense, she did not consent at all

osf.io/63d8s

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

There hasn’t been nearly enough appreciation for this amazing paper by Clark Barrett and
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Anthropologists have observed people in certain cultures blaming agents for behavior without regard to mental states (intent, knowledge, etc.). Why does this happen?

New paper in Psychological Review!

In "Causation, Meaning, and Communication" Ari Beller (cicl.stanford.edu/member/ari_b...) develops a computational model of how people use & understand expressions like "caused", "enabled", and "affected".

📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor...
🧵

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a new, multidisciplinary guide to understanding the mind: a freely-available, growing collection of peer-reviewed articles introducing key topics to a bro...

The MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a growing resource, expertly edited and designed, with high quality contributors (OK OK I am one of them) oecs.mit.edu

spooky accuracy.

When someone only has one sensible option available, do they have a choice at all? @cusimano.bsky.social and @tanialombrozo.bsky.social explore how we experience freedom: https://buff.ly/4gj0njy

Our paper on if you can incentivize rule induction in humans with money is finally out (answer is: it appears to be a very weak/0-ish effect in contrast to the huge effect of financial incentives on rote, repetitive tasks). credit to pamop, ben newell & dan bartels psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Good opportunity to work with some amazing scholars!

what counts as breaking a rule? you might think this q is easy, but people actually integrate signals from morality, legality, punishability, and normativity to figure it out, new preprint w/ @jowylie.bsky.social & dries bostyn osf.io/preprints/ps... #psychscisky #cognition #socpsyc #philsky

How do job seekers react when orgs quantify their diversity commitments? In a 🚨new paper🚨 with @ikesilver.bsky.social & Edward Chang, we explore competing predictions about how women and racial minorities react to measurable goals vs. vague, values-focused commitments.

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital,” by Brown(@clbrown.bsky.social), Kaur, Kingdon, and Schofield: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Classic thought experiments have convinced many philosophers that second-order desires have a special significance

But our intuitions about these thought experiments are driven not by the second-order desires but by something unrelated and much more fundamental

Blog post: xphi.net/2024/12/19/s...