Dorsa Amir

If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after?
The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵

A couple more examples from the same era. Quite stunning, no? And remarkably well preserved. I find these rather moving. Like, you’re actually looking at the faces of people from the past, here they are, looking back at you.

A naturalistic portrait of a woman’s face from a Fayum mummy

While this looks like it could have been painted yesterday, it’s actually a 1,700 year old (!) portrait from a Fayum mummy in modern day Egypt. This is one of ~900 of these portraits from the era, which broke from a more stylized tradition, and represented the subject more naturally.

Some non-obvious advice for psych graduate students Dorsa Amir has an excellent post titled Modest Advice For New Students. If you are going to read one thing about doing well in graduate school, click on the link and read that instead—it’s exhaustive ...

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/some-non-o...

Looking forward to following along! Such a cool project.

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Other nautical terms we still use:

➡ Flagship:...The ship with the flag; I should have known this one
➡ Taken aback: When a ship's sails are caught aback, pushing the ship backwards
➡ Above board: On or above the open deck, in plain view
➡ Loose cannon: Literally a loose cannon on the ship

Rigging on a carrack from 1500

Been reading recently about attempts to circumnavigate the globe & how 16th century ships pulled it off. Steering a ship was complicated & relied on hundreds of adjustments to complex rope systems. So, it often took a new sailor a long time to..... "learn the ropes"! So that's where that comes from.

Why a Classic Psychology Theory about Vision Has Fallen Apart The downfall of a long-standing theory in psychology raises a question: How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we literally see the world?

Do you fall for the Müller-Lyer optical illusion? Psychologists had long thought that it depends on your cultural background—the famous "carpentered-world" hypothesis. Now, that hypothesis is widely disputed. Here's why. 🧪 by @norabradford.bsky.social
www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions?

In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A little write-up of our Psych Review paper (with @chazfirestone.bsky.social) on culture and visual illusions — out now in Slate! 👇

Thanks so much @dorsaamir.bsky.social and @chazfirestone.bsky.social, along with @mcxfrank.bsky.social, for your input on this! And ofc @sarahexplains.bsky.social and @parshallison.bsky.social for your editing!

Why a Classic Psychology Theory about Vision Has Fallen Apart The downfall of a long-standing theory in psychology raises a question: How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we literally see the world?

How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we see the world? Wonderful piece in @sciam.bsky.social by @norabradford.bsky.social, ft. an interview with @dorsaamir.bsky.social about our work on the 'cultural byproduct hypothesis'.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Such cool work!

Children are often cast as passive vessels into which we pour culture. But children create cultures of their own—vibrant ones with special properties.

Just one of the topics discussed in our recent episode with @dorsaamir.bsky.social & @sheinalew.bsky.social!

Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

Next time you get worked up thinking you’re doing something wrong re: swaddling or nipple confusion or pacifiers or rocking to sleep or whatever, I’m willing to bet it’s not you, it’s your baby.

Nothing like having fraternal twins to realize how big individual differences are. All baby advice seems to assume that babies are interchangeable but let me tell you: we treat them exactly the same & it is incredibly clear that they are two _very_ different people with very different preferences.

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

New episode!! 🎙️📣

A chat w/ @sheinalew.bsky.social & @dorsaamir.bsky.social about childhood across cultures.

Humans everywhere go through childhood—a time of learning, growth, and play. But this universal stage of life can look very different in different places.

Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

screenshot of an article from the guardian. the first sentence says "The second study, by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone, takes a sledgehammer to this hypothesis, but for the much better-known illusion: the Müller-Lyer illusion"

more article text: There are many explanations for why the Müller-Lyer illusion is so effective. One of the more popular is that the arrowheads are interpreted by the brain as cues about three-dimensional depth, so our brains implicitly interpret the illusion as representing an object of some kind, with right angles and straight lines. This explanation fits neatly with the “carpentered world” hypothesis – and indeed a lot of early support for this hypothesis relied on apparent cultural variability in how the Müller-Lyer illusion is perceived. In their study, Amir and Firestone carefully and convincingly dismantle this explanation. They point out that non-human animals experience the illusion, as shown in a range of studies in which animals (including guppies, pigeons and bearded dragons) are trained to prefer the longer of two lines, and then presented with the Müller-Lyer image. They show that it works without straight lines, and for touch as well as vision. They note that it even works for people who until recently have been blind, referencing an astonishing experiment in which nine children, blind from birth because of dense cataracts, were shown the illusion immediately after the cataracts were surgically removed. Not only had these children not seen highly carpentered environments – they hadn’t seen anything at all. After you absorb their analysis, it’s pretty clear that the Müller-Lyer illusion is not due to culturally specific exposure to carpentry.

i think our arguments are more like precision instruments but ok fine i will accept "sledgehammer" (@dorsaamir.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social @theguardian.com)

Look what you could publish (anonymously) in Nature in 1970.

Keep Cognitive Psychology WEIRD Back in 2010, Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan dropped a bomb[1] on psychology with their paper "The WEIRDest people in the world?" They argued that most psychology studies rely on Western...

Fish see visual illusions the same way humans do. Flies too. And bees. This changes everything about the WEIRD sampling debate in cognitive psychology. New post on @dorsaamir.bsky.social and @chazfirestone.bsky.social's devastating paper.

When development constricts our moral circle Nature Human Behaviour - Although many believe our moral circles expand with age, this Perspective discusses an early-emerging tendency to care for others.

🥳🥳 New paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com: “When development constricts our moral circle." Contrary to popular belief, younger kids may start out with broader moral circles than older ones. Check it out here 👉 rdcu.be/eoaSe
w/ @mattiwilks.bsky.social @karrineldner.bsky.social & Lucius Caviola

You could get away with a lot in the 1960s, eh?

Hofstede then assigned a single, unchanging score for each dimension to each country, based on averages. No measure of variance or heterogeneity was reported in his results, which gives the false impression of cultural homogeneity.

We also very rarely talk about the bizarre "Masculinity/Femininity" dimension. The "feminine" pole is based on 2 questions: how important is it that you (1) work with people who cooperate well with one another & that (2) you have the security to work for your company as long as you want to.

So, a wildly unrepresentative sample (the gender discrepancy alone..), from nearly 60 years ago, on a specific type of worker at a single company, with data collected for an entirely different purpose. The ideas are interesting, but I think serious caution is warranted when using these constructs.

Many of us have heard of Hofstede's cultural dimensions (e.g. the individualistic-collectivist (IC) dimension), but few have looked under the hood of how they were constructed. The data, it turns out, come from self-report surveys of IBM employees ca. 1968-72. Here's McSweeney describing the sample:

Out today!

Thanks, Joan! Lots of readings from Boyd & Silk :)