Our new short piece in TiCS on intuitive theories of truth: how people judge whether statements could be true, whether statements are true, and whether to assert them as true. A great collab with @keremoktar.bsky.social
@ihandleyminer.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social
📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social!
Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does?
In short, yes!
New paper: The origins of meaning: From pragmatic control signals to semantic representations
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...
New paper out in Science Advances! I'm really (really) proud of this one. Let's get into it. doi.org/10.1126/scia...
28.02.2026 05:07 — 👍 28 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 0
Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of?
In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Very excited to share a Special Collection at the Journal of Neuroscience (@sfnjournals.bsky.social) - Central Questions for Social Neuroscience Research. This issue includes some of the latest perspectives on social neuroscience research. Please check it out!👇
www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8
1/ New paper in Communications Psychology: Against Frictionless AI. Led by my student Emily Zohar and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social.
The argument: AI's greatest selling point is also its problem.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
A new paper dropped out on "Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Understanding the evolution of human semiotic behavior is a crucial (basic) scientific enterprise & really difficult, so kudos!
I have thoughts: 1/
A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:
The Deliberation Taboo
Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/
osf.io/preprints/ps...
This study tracked neural responses to political content over 2.5 years using fMRI. Changes in political identity influenced neural plasticity, with significant shifts in the amygdala, hippocampus, caudate, & reward systems, reflecting evolving political affiliations.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
We have a new paper out on how the AI boom is creating a scientific monoculture! Everything AI.
"The task for social science is to ensure that, in navigating this moment, we do not become artificial ourselves."
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Led by the brilliant @cecilietraberg.bsky.social
🚨 JOB alert: 📢
We are looking for a PhD student to work on our international @wellcometrust.bsky.social project on information gathering in OCD and Schizophrenia!
If you have a background in computational psychiatry / neuroimnaging and speak German, apply here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...
Do individuals possess introspective access to their implicit evaluations? Although recent research shows that people can often predict their scores on indirect measures, it remains unclear whether this effect reflects genuine introspection or inferential reasoning. We tested an anchoring-and-adjustment account, proposing that individuals predict implicit evaluations by anchoring on accessible explicit evaluations and then adjusting based on available information, such as cultural knowledge. Across three experiments (N = 3,182), we used a relational evaluative conditioning paradigm with novel nonwords to isolate explicit evaluations as the primary source for inference. Manipulating the align-ment between explicit and implicit evaluations, between or within participants, yielded consistent support for the anchoring-and-adjustment hypothesis. Predictions were accurate only when explicit evaluations provided a valid cue; when the two dissociated, accuracy fell systematically below chance. These findings suggest that knowledge of one’s implicit evaluations is dominantly derived from explicit cues rather than discovered through direct introspection.
Excited to share this preprint with Yahel Nudler and @thatadammorris.bsky.social in which we provide further evidence that people’s awareness of implicit evaluations is shaky at best — when explicit evaluations provide a misleading cue, participants systematically mispredict: osf.io/preprints/ps...
20.02.2026 14:04 — 👍 14 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
New preprint!!
Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so...
Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.
My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle!
We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate.
It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations.
Spread the words!
This work is a results of enjoyable discussions and chats with @mjcrockett.bsky.social and @natvelali.bsky.social in our cultural evolution reading meetings during my visit to Princeton.
20.02.2026 19:24 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
New preprint!!
Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so...
Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.
I just learned that Mattick & Amaral's book about RNA is availabe in an online version:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK595...
Highly recommended! Not just for the science but also for the history of science aspect.
Two side-by-side images depicting the nested hierarchical IPOMDP and the non-hierarchical x-IPOMDP mechanism.
What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead!
Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception
jair.org/index.php/ja...
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
18.02.2026 01:05 — 👍 140 🔁 45 💬 2 📌 0
This new paper offers practical solutions for pluralistic ignorance (when people assume their opinon is unpopular when many others share it):
-in loose cultures, share accurate information
-in tight ones, lowering the costs of speaking up can spark social change.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.
How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?
Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.
People form beliefs not only as individual agents, but as members of social groups.
Children (4-6 years old) who belonged to a group were more convinced by evidence that supported their ingroup’s belief (and were less convinced by evidence that opposed their ingroup): www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Header of an article published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (volume 109, 2025, pages 12–20), titled "Not wasted on the young: Childhood, trait complexes & human behavioral ecology," authored by Andra Meneganzin (KU Leuven) and Adrian Currie (University of Exeter), shown in Elsevier’s standard journal layout with logo and publication details.
How did childhood evolve? @andrameneganzin.bsky.social & @adrian-currie.bsky.social argue that childhood is a ‘trait complex,’ and this engenders trade-offs between the precision & historical relevance of tests performed in #BehavioralEcology 👇📃 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #evosky #philsci
16.02.2026 09:39 — 👍 9 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
Article w/ @mfhansen.bsky.social out and open access. In it we outline key historical patterns and the changes in primatology and the behavioural sciences regarding the concepts of primate culture.
Interested in primatology and culture (and history)? check it out!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Another good critique of the EES is this adversarial collaboration by @thomscottphillips.bsky.social et al. (2014): academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
12.02.2026 19:51 — 👍 7 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
Our cultural backgrounds almost always (perhaps unavoidably) influence our epistemology & the questions we ask. Especially in the human sciences. E.g. some really interesting discussion here about how renascence values shape our thinking about neanderthal artwork.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
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📢 New Paper 🚨
Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.
In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.
bit.ly/4kvLOwA
1/ Breaking down the "Trilingual Gender Stereotypes Database" (TGSD)—a new, validated resource for understanding how gender stereotypes work across English, Hebrew, and Arabic. #SocialPsych #Stereotypes #PsychSciSky
09.02.2026 17:37 — 👍 10 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0
