Andrew Shtulman

New article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.

New paper! 🚨

Does studying psychology change how people think about psychology (even at an intuitive level)? 🤔

We tracked students across their degree and found shifts in their beliefs about the bases of psychological phenomena and their scientific explainability.

1/5

I see what you did there 😉

Submit your work to Origins of the Social Mind at #SPSP2026! Our morning timeslot is compatible with a variety of fantastic afternoon preconferences (e.g., Social Cognition, Gender).

Deadline is 10/13! (Talks/posters can focus on any topic related to the origins of social cognition). See you there!

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!

New article in Cognition! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Children are able to differentiate fake news from real news even before exposure to fake news on social media. This ability improves with age & even more so with cognitive reflection or the disposition to question an initial intuition.

Oooh, the Spanish translation of Learning to Imagine is pretty!

The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations “In recent months, a curious fixation has emerged in corners of academia: the em dash. More specifically, the apparent moral panic around how it is...

As an inveterate em-dash user, I loved this. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

The archive also includes the thousands of mollusks he gathered, described, and classified when he was just a teenager.

I’m honored to be a keynote speaker at the 5th Jean Piaget Conference at the University of Geneva. A highlight of the conference waa a tour of the Jean Piaget archives, which includes 80,000 documents currently being organized and systemized. 10,000 of those documents are experimental protocols!

“Some effects emerged that have the happiness of being significant”—that translation seems sound. Effects are happiest when they are significant.

Watched a presentation today delivered in French but translated into English at the bottom of the PPT slides using AI. "Translated" is a generous description. I'm pretty sure the speaker did not say "I've got some bananas for you after I've exploded my talk."

A colleague asked if I've read Arisotle's Poetics recently. I'm flattered he thought I had read it at all.

Ithaca airport keeps playing a message about TSA prefaced with “due to the increased situation.” I hate it when situations increase.

The @socphilpsych.bsky.social presidential banquet begins with the (attempted) roast by John Doris of the (seemingly unroastable) @andrewshtulman.bsky.social

#SPP2025

Is there a tradeoff between the breadth and depth of moral concern? Not at the level of individual perception. @joshrottman.bsky.social finds that people who are concerned about strangers as much as friends also show deeper concern for both. #SPP2025

(I never miss a Josh Rottman talk!)

Infants have been shown to individuate objects before people in a visual occlusion task. Why? @brandonwoo.bsky.social, @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social, et al. find that engagement matters. Infants *do* individuate people who actively engage with them.

Is learning always good? Zoe Jenkin argues that it’s not; learners are often worse off when they misapply newfound knowledge and need to recognize the superficiality of their understanding to make progress toward genuine expertise. #SPP2025

Day 3 of #SPP2025. Marina Bedny shares fascinating evidence that congenitally blind people use the same intuitive theories of color as sighted people to predict and explain object coloration even when they disagree about what color an object tends to be.

The highlight of Day 2 was @tamarkushnir.bsky.social singing “Pure Imagination” at a restaurant in Ithaca—a song by she dedicated to me. 😊

@shannonspaulding.bsky.social delivers the 2025 Stanton Prize address, explicating the tools we use to understand other minds and how they lead to systematic types of mistakes. #SPP2025

Do children use counterevidence to change their mind if changing their mind means disagreeing with their ingroup? No! Zoe Finiasz, @tamarkushnir.bsky.social, et al. find that children will refrain from revising their beliefs if their ingroup is defined by that belief. #SPP2025

Josep Sommer and Tania Lombrozo uncover inconsistencies in belief with a clever question-asking paradigm with items like:

1. Do whales have hair? (No!)

2. Are whales mammals? (Yes!)

3. Do all mammals have hair? (Yes! Wait a minute…)

#SPP2025

Kristin Andrew’s makes the case for using conceptual analysis to decide questions about shared mental traits in comparative psychology. #SPP2025

Where do core cognitive skills come from? Justin Wood argues that space-time fitting to the statistics of environmental input can explain a lot of early emerging abilities. #SPP2925

Day 2 of #SPP2025 begins with a fascinating talk by @chriskrupenye.bsky.social on whether chimpanzees and bonobos have a theory of mind. Krupenye’s studies show that our ape cousins track others’ knowledge not just to obtain food but also for a seemingly intrinsic love of drama!

Are evil acts always wrong? No! Ryan Wheat & Geoffrey Goodwin find that judgments of evil are qualitatively distinct from judgments of wrongdoing and seem to depend on disdain more than harm or injustice. #SPP2025

Is complexity a unitary concept? Tal Boger & @chazfirestone.bsky.social show that we see complex shapes, dot arrays, melodies, words, and equations as sharing a deep feature even though they vary in their superficial features, & this perception is transferable, automatic, and consequential. #SPP2025

Tom Griffiths invites the #SPP2025 audience to rethink rationality, from “doing the right thing” to “doing the right thinking.”