Rodney Tompkins

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New work! Kristin Shutts and I review how help can in some cases backfire and lead to detriments in children’s self-views, views of others, and motivation, especially when help is distributed unequally. Check it out here (open access!):
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Title page of the paper "Merging in Close Relationships"

Excited to share a new paper in Current Directions on the theme of merging in close relationships, with @emmamcgorray.bsky.social, @erinhughes.bsky.social , and @abdoe.bsky.social! In the paper, we discuss merging in the domains of selves, goals, processing, and reality. tinyurl.com/ynbedzys (1/4)

continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

On Wednesday: Adena Schachner, talk: "Intuitive Archeology: Social reasoning from the physical world”, W ~10 am, Fourth Level (Pacific) Room A. Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster: "How children explore and detect augmented reality filters", W 10-11 am, Fourth level (Pacific) Room E. On Thursday: Amy Nguyễn, Rodney Tompkins & Adena Schachner, poster, "When walls talk: People make social inferences from towns’ protective features", Th 1:00-2:15, P1-T-194 On Saturday: Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster, "Perceived musicality in an android increases positive social attributions", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-113 Shirley Liu, Craig McKenzie & Adena Schachner, poster, "When Default Options Explain Away Preferences: A Causal Reasoning Account of Mental State Reasoning from Default Options ", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-11

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

A list of the SoCal Lab's presentations at CogSci. In brief: Lindsey Powell is giving talks in Workshop 1 on July 30 at 9:30 am and in Symposium 1 on July 31. Tori Hennessy is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition 1 session on July 31. Bill Pepe is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition session on August 1. Coxi Jiang is giving a talk in the Emotion session on August 1. Rodney Tompkins is presenting a poster in Session 2 on August 1.

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

A new piece - well, almost a whole book! - by our team, reflecting more than a decade of work.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

⭐ Out now in Developmental Science ⭐

"Sounds of Hidden Agents: The development of causal reasoning about musical sounds"

(by Minju Kim and me)

causal reasoning, music/auditory cognition, event reconstruction, kids' integration of information...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Junior Specialist-Lab for Infant Learning And Cognition (LILAC), Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

I'm hiring a full-time #labmanager for my new Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at UCSB! The start date is flexible, but could be as early as August 1, 2025. Application review begins July 17th and will continue until the position is filled 👶🪴

recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02992

#academicjobs

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

The Comparative Status Hypothesis: Inferences About Discrimination Vary Based on Identity Salience - Elizabeth A. Quinn-Jensen, Anh L. K. Tran, Sara E. Burke, Brenda Major, Zoe Liberman, 2025 Past research examining when people label an outcome as discrimination has largely ignored contextual factors beyond the victim–perpetrator dyad. We contend tha...

Excited that this paper is finally out (in collaboration with @zoeliberman.bsky.social @saraburke.bsky.social & Brenda Major) in PSPB!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

This paper stems from one of the first projects I worked on as a lab manager, closely following many fruitful discussions during my time as a post-bacc RA! I'm incredibly grateful for my lab communities as well as the many reviewers along the way. Looking forward to hearing what folks think!

With age, people likewise judged the lying friend (vs. classmate) as meaner. This pattern was similar to that for failure to help scenarios (replicating original findings from Marshall, Wynn, and Bloom, 2020, Child Dev).

In comparative contexts directly contrasting the relationships (ridding of alternatives like private interaction and/or extending an olive branch), with age people evaluated it as worse for a friend to lie. Thanks to a helpful reviewer, we also show that this divergence may emerge as early as age 4.

Here we show that these early evaluations are not only sensitive to acts of omission (harming by failing to do the right thing, like failing to help), but extend to and follow similar developmental trajectories as acts of commission (harming by doing the wrong thing, like lying).

Past work shows that older children and adults (but not younger children) expect and judge friends as obligated to help, and evaluate a friend (vs. classmate) as meaner for failing to do so.

New paper with past honors student Vanessa Chao and @zoeliberman.bsky.social in press at JECP:

“Children can consider social relationships when evaluating liars”

By the early elementary school years, people judge it as worse and meaner for a friend (vs. classmate) to lie.

doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

1. New paper first-authored by former post-doc Young-eun Lee (currently at MIT with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social) now in press at JECP! More info in thread below, full text here: columbiasamclab.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/....
🧪 #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #CogPsyc @socphilpsych.bsky.social

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little is known about the developmental and evolutionary roots ...

New paper from Laura Lewis and Jan Engelmann et al. (including me) with a clever new method. Chimps and kids will forgo reward to get a chance to look at social interactions
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

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

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research.

NSF Astronomy was cut by 53%

Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79%

Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO.

#GiftLink ⚛️🔭

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

SoCal MInDS The Department of Psychology at UC San Diego is pleased to host the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) on Saturday, May 17, 2025. Our goal is t...

We were so lucky to be joined by so many. Stay tuned for SoCal MInDS 2026, and cheers to a resurgence of a SoCal developmental science meeting! sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/soc...

We were lucky to receive so much support from members of our Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Science, including @asmithflores.bsky.social who coined SoCal MInDS, Salih Özdemir who created our logo, and Tori Hennessy and @kostaboskovic.bsky.social who affirmed that our science is COOL! 😎

SoCal MInDS The Department of Psychology at UC San Diego is pleased to host the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) on Saturday, May 17, 2025. Our goal is t...

We were so lucky to be joined by so many. Stay tuned for SoCal MInDS 2026, and cheers to a resurgence of a SoCal developmental science meeting! sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/soc...

I was lucky to co-organize with @carenwalker.bsky.social and @drbarner.bsky.social.

But, I think we accomplished exactly what we set out to do, and perhaps in a time when we needed it more: We hosted an event geared toward building community, fostering future collaborations, and discussing recent findings in developmental science. It felt like a lighthouse in a storm.

Planning started in October 2024, and I had a very different idea of the context/circumstances this meeting would take place in.

Posters taped over windows and on hallway walls made a comeback, too!