Chris Krupenye

This week’s cover of New York Magazine is absolutely brutal.

#CrowCoG is hiring🚨MULTIPLE PAID RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITIONS 🚨for our 2026 field season (May - Sep)! Field and aviary-based positions - come help us study the remarkable tool-making New Caledonian crows. Apply here: bit.ly/3WlxxHE

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

How do our brains learn when choices affect both ourselves and others?

New work by @shawnrhoadsphd.com, @aa-marsh.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, @drjocutler.bsky.social, et al. in @natcomms.nature.com reveals shared neural computations for prosocial & antisocial learning

rdcu.be/eL8mZ

US PhD admissions shrink as fears over Trump’s cuts take hold Some doctoral programmes are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding.

Fewer grad students means less science, but many STEM PhD programs in the US are cutting back on admissions this year due to federal funding uncertainties. Words by me for @nature.com:

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@emsque.bsky.social @ucsdcooperlab.bsky.social @julieposselt.bsky.social 🧪

The Adaptive Relationships Framework illustrating how broad socioecological pressures shape the social solutions animals use to meet these challenges, and how these lead to social strategies and emergent structures that help them gain access to those solutions.

Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*?

In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts.

tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

Here's the newest piece in the @nytimes.com "Lost Science" series. @emilyanthes.bsky.social talks to a scientist who was learning about the minds of elephants--and how to use those insights to help the animals coexist with farmers. Gift link: nyti.ms/3KXVSAG

Abstract submission for #CO32026 is now open, join us next April in Montreal 🎉🍁🦫 Submit for a symposium by November 14th, or for an individual talk or poster by December 12th.
Information on the conference and a link to the member portal where you can submit: comparativecognition.org/conference.php

$40 billion dollars is the size of the entire NIH budget.

Notice how the adultification of Black children (especially young Black men) is the inverse of the infantilization of White adults (especially fully grown White men). It holds Black children as always blameworthy and White adults as blameless.

JD Vance brushes off racist texts by adults in Republican group chat as ‘what kids do’ Vice-president downplays messages such as ‘I love Hitler’ in chat by 24 to 35-year-olds to ‘stupid jokes’

For those of you keeping score, 18-22 year-old students calling for an end to slaughter in Gaza are so racist they need to be expelled or deported, but 24-35 year-olds celebrating Hitler, rape, and, um, racism are just kids being kids so chill.

Also, racism is over so no need for Voting Right Act.

The Study of Early Social Evaluation: Contextualizing Failures to Replicate and Looking Forward Abstract. In classic research, Hamlin et al. (2007) found that infants preferentially reach to agents who help others over agents who hinder others. These early findings provided evidence that infants...

Exciting news: My lab has published our first paper! Here, we review the literature on early social evaluation, and we make recommendations about how to best study social evaluation in infants and toddlers.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia Neophobia (the aversive response to novelty) varies considerably across species and individuals, and can impact adaptability and survival. This study assesses neophobia in 1400 subjects from 136 bird ...

🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology:
“A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.”
Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
@themanybirds.bsky.social

The Journal of Comparative Psychology is offering one editorial fellowship for 2026. More details can be found in the link below.

Submissions due by November 1.

www.apa.org/pubs/journal...

Thanks @chazfirestone.bsky.social! Always a treat to share the mysteries and wonder of animal minds with Intro students!

Chris Krupenye posing with his title slide and a bottle of Macallan 12

Thank you @chriskrupenye.bsky.social for visiting Intro Psych!

Hope you enjoy the whiskey as much as we enjoyed your guest lecture :)

We’re hiring!

@sucholutsky.bsky.social and I are seeking a postdoc and RA for a project on trust in AI systems with folks at NYU, Princeton, BU, and Cornell

Positions open until filled. Apply soon! Please share 🔁

postdoc: apply.interfolio.com/175495

RA: apply.interfolio.com/175497

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce…

🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉

The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

For Apes, Out of Sight Isn't Out of Mind: New Findings from a Study at Johns Hopkins University Bonobos can mentally track multiple members of their social circle, new study finds.

A bonobo named Kanzi has shown that apes can mentally keep track of multiple familiar humans at once through hide-and-seek experiments.

This research from @jhu.edu, led by @chriskrupenye.bsky.social, can help us understand more about how animals keep track of their groupmates.

bit.ly/4nIp5h9

Tom Homan was investigated for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. Trump's DOJ shut it down. The FBI and Justice officials closed the investigation, which a Justice Department appointee had called a “deep state” probe in early 2025.

1. BREAKING

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration.

Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech The Trump administration said on Friday it would ask companies to pay $100,000 per year for H-1B worker visas, prompting some big tech companies to warn visa holders to stay in the U.S. or quickly return.

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research.

And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

currently at record-high search interest for canceling disney plus. pulling kimmel is a bigger deal to the company's bottom line than any of the "woke" scandals of the past 5 years. i think news & entertainment corp execs need put more work into understanding their audience, & get off twitter

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion.

The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion.

Our problem isn't a lack of resources.

Our problem is ever-expanding inequality.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

Dogs extend verbal labels for functional classification of objects The relationship between language and human thought is an ongoing debate,1 and it has been proposed that language shapes object categorization.2 Words…

Excited to share the latest (but still not the last!) study I had the chance to work on with the Family Dog Project 🐶🇭🇺

We found that Gifted Word Learner dogs' talent goes beyond what we expected; they can generalise words based on function, not just looks.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Let’s be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel Trump’s most brazen attack on free speech yet.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups

“It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,” [John Cohen] added. “It is the job of law enforcement to prevent acts of violence and criminal activity.”

Fragmentation increased in over half of global forests from 2000 to 2020 Habitat fragmentation, in which contiguous forests are broken into smaller, isolated patches, threatens biodiversity by disrupting species movement, shrinking populations, and altering ecosystem dynam...

Analysis of habitat connectivity and aggregation suggested that more than half of global #forests have become more fragmented over the past two decades, painting a picture of widespread forest degradation beyond the direct effects of #habitat loss

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

Come work with us! UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is looking for a new Assistant Professor to join our team: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

I'm not on the committee, but happy to talk if you're interested.