Society for Philosophy and Psychology

The moral pull of “women and children” Victimized “women and children” are frequently featured in the media, yet the consequences of this phrase are far from clear. Across six experiments (…

The moral pull of “women and children”

🚨Work by Anastasiia D. Grigoreva Crean, Stella F. Lourenco & Arber Tasimi

Somebody Should Do Something Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from o...

Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change

📚From Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Daniel Kelly

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind Prior research shows that when people try to think of things, such as solutions to a problem, the options that come to mind most often are those that …

🚨Recent work from Jane Acierno, Clare Kennedy, Fiery Cushman & Jonathan Phillips:

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind

Contrasting guilty minds: Exposure to contrast concepts narrows conceptions of acting knowingly and recklessly

🚨From Christian Mott and Larisa Heiphetz Solomon

Seeking New Information With Old Questions: Children and Adults Reuse and Recombine Concepts From Prior Questions Abstract. Question asking is a key tool for learning about the world, especially in childhood. However, formulating good questions is challenging. In any given situation, many questions are possible b...

📣Recent work by Emily G. Liquin, Marjorie Rhodes & Todd M. Gureckis:

Seeking new information with old questions: Children and adults reuse and recombine concepts from prior questions

Children's detection of online misinformation Adults' ability to detect online misinformation is improved by cognitive reflection and targeted instruction. Is the same true for children, who are a…

🌟From Andrew Shtulman, Lucy Stoll, Lesly Sabroso & Andrew Young:

Children's detection of online misinformation

Preschool teachers provide fewer participation opportunities to working-class students than those from more privileged backgrounds

‼️ Recent work by Lewis Doyle, Andrei Cimpian, Louise Goupil & Sébastien Goudeau

Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex A wealth of studies report evidence that occipitotemporal cortex tessellates into ‘category-selective’ brain regions that are apparently specialized for representing ecologically important visual s...

Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex

‼️Recent work by J. Brendan Ritchie, Susan G. Wardle, Maryam Vaziri-Paskham, Dwight J. Kravitz & Chris I. Baker

The role of gender labels and gendered appearances in children's social inferences Two preregistered studies investigated how children use gender labels and gendered appearances when making inductive inferences about unfamiliar indiv…

The Role of Gender Labels and Gendered Appearances in Children's Social Inferences

🚨From Jenna Alton, Andrei Cimpian & Lucas Payne Butler

Revising Simulation Theory Beyond Recognition: A Reply to Yousefi Heris (2024) - Erkenntnis (Yousefi Heris, Erkenntnis, 2024) offers a version of simulation theory, building on (Goldman, Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading, Oxford University Press, 2...

📣From Mitchell Herschbach:

Revising Simulation Theory Beyond Recognition: A Reply to Yousefi Heris (2024)

Motivated bias blind spot: people confess to more or less bias depending on its desirability - Mind & Society Though people readily claim that others fall prey to several biases, they are less likely to recognize those same biases in themselves – a tendency termed bias blind spot (Pronin et al. in Personality...

Motivated bias blind spot: people confess to more or less bias depending on its desirability

‼️Work by Francisco Cruz & André Mata

Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions - Nature Communications Abilities to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial actions are crucial for sustaining cooperative systems. Here, the authors show that human newborns with just 5 days of postnatal experience al...

🚨From Alessandra Geraci, Luca Surian, Lucia Gabriela Tina & J. Kiley Hamlin:

Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions

Lay perceptions of psychology: the (mis)match between lay beliefs and explanatory stances People do not think that all psychological phenomena are equally explainable through science: Psychological phenomena associated with a high first-person subjective experience (henceforth, FPSE; i....

Lay perceptions of psychology: the (mis)match between lay beliefs and explanatory stances

📣Work by Francisco Cruz & André Mata

Logical Concepts of (Im)possibility Guide Young Children's Decision‐Making The human capacity for rational decisions hinges on modal judgment: the discernment of what could, has to, or cannot happen. This ability was proposed to be a late outcome of human cognitive develop.....

🌟From Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti, Sofia Jáuregui, Peter Mazalik, Shaun Nichols & Justin Halberda:

Logical concepts of (im)possibility guide young children's decision-making

Intergenerational inferences about punishment: Judgments of children of incarcerated parents across development

‼️Recent work from Emily Gerdin, Devyani Goel, James P. Dunlea & Larisa Heiphetz Solomon

Nice piece by @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social where he implies that the only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those at SPP (@socphilpsych.bsky.social). I agree!

A big shoutout to @levelsof.bsky.social & @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social for putting together a conversation-inspiring SPP 2025!

A nice post in praise of the @socphilpsych.bsky.social and the virtue of interdisplinary-mindedness.

Of machines and men: Attributions of moral responsibility in AI-assisted warfare - Ethics and Information Technology Ethics and Information Technology - The ongoing development of autonomous weapons systems, and the increasing frequency of their deployment on the battlefield, poses a pressing problem for military...

Of Machines and Men: Attributions of Moral Responsibility in AI-Assisted Warfare

📣 Work by Philip Robbins

Cognition and the Arts Cambridge Core - Cognition - Cognition and the Arts

🚨📚 From Timothy Justus:

Cognition and the Arts: From Naturalized Aesthetics to the Cognitive Humanities

Home - Consortium on Moral Decision-Making Welcome to the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making A collaborative hub dedicated to unraveling the intricate threads of ethical choices. As a multidisciplinary alliance of scholars, thinkers, and prac...

As the fall semester begins, I'd like to send a call to anyone who would like to get involved in our Consortium on Moral Decision-Making. We're a dedicated network of morality and ethics researchers focused on breaking outside siloes to work together on big questions.
moralconsortium.psu.edu 1/n

Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis Why our fascination with psychopaths is scientifically wrongheaded, and how the criminal justice system has misused the controversial science of psychopath

📣📚By Rasmus R. Larsen:

Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis

What will society think about AI consciousness? Lessons from the animal case How will society respond to the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) could be conscious? Drawing on lessons from perceptions of animal consciousness…

What will society think about AI consciousness? Lessons from the animal case

‼️From Lucius Caviola, Jeff Sebo & Jonathan Birch

How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon - Nature Human Behaviour Cruz and Lombrozo examine how laypeople make sense of scientific explanations and find that although jargon reduces understanding, for short explanations, jargon makes the explanation more satisfying.

📣 From Francisco Cruz & Tania Lombrozo:

How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon

Joshua May & Victor Kumar, Eating Fewer Animals: A Defense of Reducetarianism - PhilPapers Moral arguments against the consumption of animal products from factory farms are traditionally categorical. The conclusions require people to eliminate from their diets all animal products (veganism)...

Eating Fewer Animals: A Defense of Reducetarianism

🚨 Recent work by Joshua May & Victor Kumar

‼️ From Julian De Freitas, Gideon Nave & Stefano Puntoni:

Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond

Children’s and adults’ understanding of how punishment shapes social relationships Punishment regulates selfish behaviors and maintains cooperation. However, because punishment imposes costs on another person, it could also harm rela…

🚨 From Young-eun Lee & Larisa Heiphetz Solomon:

Children's and adults' understanding of how punishment shapes social relationships

Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future

📣 Work by Esra N. Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe

Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence From a Corpus of 98 Shows From 1960 to 2018 - Andrea C. Vial, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ruyuan Zuo, Shreya Haval... Biased media content shapes children’s social concepts and identities. We examined gender bias in a large corpus of scripts from 98 children’s television progra...

Syntactic and semantic gender biases in the language on children’s television: Evidence from a corpus of 98 shows from 1960 to 2018

🚨 From Andrea C. Vial, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ruyuan Zuo, Shreya Havaldar, Eleanor K. Chestnut, Morteza Dehghani & Andrei Cimpian

Dynamic point-light cloths generate rich percepts beyond biology Highly sparse stimuli can nevertheless give rise to rich percepts of biological motion, suggesting a potentially unique form of “social perception.” Erdogan et al. show that such phenomena also occur ...

🌟 From Merve Erodan, Wenyan Bi, Ilker Yildirim & Brian Scholl:

Dynamic point-light cloths generate rich percepts beyond biology

Unregulated Emotional Risks of AI Wellness Apps

‼️ Recent work from Julian De Freitas & Glenn Cohen