David Levari

Amazing! Congrats, Emma!

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

Congrats Tom! 🎉

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

Member Spotlight: 2025 Spence Awardee Julia Leonard on Celebrating Children’s Progress This Yale University researcher discusses her efforts to understand children’s approach to learning.

Honored to win the 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award! You can read more about my research and journey here www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Sometimes people say its fair for those with advantage to get more (best office to the CEO...); other times, the opposite seems more fair (... charity to the needy). In this new work, Arthur and Xavier try to explain why. See the preprint link and explainer thread below:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Cover of the Handbook of Social Psychology 6th edition 2025

Since 1954, "The Handbook of Social Psychology" has been the field’s most authoritative reference work, and today is the launch of the 6th edition with 50 new chapters by 100 leading scholars. Best news? The HSP is now an open-access public resource—free to read, download, and share. the-hsp.com

Come join us! I have startup funds to hire a postdoc for Fall 2025 at Rutgers to study intergroup relations. The job ad is at jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249... & evaluations begin in 1 wk (5/16) w rolling evaluation. See 🧵below for a write-up on what I'm looking for in a postdoc. Please share widely!

UChicago students debate and make deals in ‘Psychology of Negotiation’ course Each week, students navigate negotiations in popular course

One of my most cherished undergrad courses, a long time ago. I hope Boaz still shows clips from Chaplin and other silent films as students find their seats (which, as he explained, contain more lessons about the mind than most research articles).

college.uchicago.edu/news/academi...

Introspective access to value-based multi-attribute choice processes - Nature Communications People routinely choose between multi-attribute options, such as which movie to watch. Here, the authors show people often have accurate insight into their choices, challenging the notion that people ...

Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper at @natcomms.nature.com challenges this view. With @rcarl.bsky.social sky.social, @hedykober.bsky.social y.social, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵

Congrats to my first PhD student Dr Flora Zhang!!!!! Make sure to check out her amazing work on intuitive theories of acquisition (and why they matter) @leonardlearnlab.bsky.social

Will be recruiting a lab manager, PhD student, and postdoc for my new lab, so please reach out if you're interested! Also, on the hunt for a good lab name—suggestions welcome! Deeply grateful to all my mentors, friends, and collaborators who helped me get here.

Personalized Emotion Detection from Floor Vibrations Induced by Footsteps Emotion recognition is critical for various applications such as early detection of mental health disorders and emotion based smart home systems. Previous studies used various sensing methods for emot...

@amit-goldenberg.bsky.social 👀👟
arxiv.org/abs/2503.04190

The Red Queen believed "6 impossible things before breakfast."

But what about *inconceivable* things?

For your breakfast read, check out the new preprint:

"Shades of Zero: Distinguishing Impossibility from Inconceivability"

(by @jennhu.bsky.social , Sosa, & me)

arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20469

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

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

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See
Illusions Where There are None"

osf.io/preprints/ps...

(this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

Home | The Visual Learning Lab at UCSD Lab webpage for the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD, lead by Dr. Bria Long, Ph.D. Launching in July 2024!

The Visual Learning Lab at UC San Diego is looking for a postdoctoral research fellow to join our lab!

Read more about our lab at www.vislearnlab.org

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉

tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

A secondary but neat finding in our new work: We find neural evidence for rewards biasing social perception.

We’ve previously found that rewards lead people to see others in a more positive light. We’ve argued this reflects a kind of affect-as-information…

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

Social rejection sucks, but they also provide a learning signal. Here we show that the two aspects of social rejection can be dissociated using computational modeling and neuroimaging.

Delighted to have been able to be part of this work, definitely one of the most fun collaborations I've had!

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

Range-frequency effects can explain and eliminate prevalence-induced concept change Why would concepts seem to grow when their instances become rare? Human observers can respond to decreases in stimulus prevalence by expanding their c…

Thanks Rafael! People who read that paper might be interested in this follow-up work too: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Out in PNAS Nexus🚨
Content moderators can often get exposed to falsehoods
In field studies with professional moderators, we show that exposure to false claims increases belief in those claims -
BUT getting them to consider accuracy when exposed prevents this!
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab at Brown! Please apply if you're interested in judgment and decision-making, social+cognitive psych, or using games/experiments/computational models to understand human behavior. Apps due Dec 1! More info: davidlevari.com

Now forthcoming in Experimental Economics!

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This paper, with @yeli.bsky.social and Cade Massey, is a follow-up to my 2005 Management Science paper with Cade.

Know a student applying to Psych PhD programs?

Are they interested in vision and cognition and application? We're recruiting for next fall at the University of Toronto!

Core topics: vision in the world [driving, readability, individual differences, spatial vision, clinical tests]

www.applylab.org

One month!

This is a promotional image with a dark blue background and text that reads, “Virtual Event. Monday, November 4, 2024. 12:00 - 2:00 PM Eastern Time (17:00 - 19:00 Universal Time). Diversity Open House: Applying to the Psychology PhD at UofT. Learn and ask questions about our PhD program and how to apply! Who is welcome? Everyone who wants to apply to the Psychology PhD program and especially students from historically excluded groups.”. It contains the University of Toronto logo in the upper left corner and a QR code that links to the website where you can register for the event in the upper right corner. Register to Receive the Zoom Link: https://forms.office.com/r/tzNxtwG9B0

The @applylab.bsky.social is recruiting PhD students for next year through UofT's Psychology PhD program.

So, if you know a student interested in vision science x application, put them in touch (email is best!).

Dept virtual open house on 4 November: register here forms.office.com/r/tzNxtwG9B0

In simple but challenging search tasks, most errors are stochastic - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics In visual search tasks in the lab and in the real world, people routinely miss targets that are clearly visible: so-called look but fail to see (LBFTS) errors. If search displays are shown to the same...

Alternative title: Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on me (unrelated to previous shame)

link.springer.com/article/10.3...