Matan Mazor

An exploration of basic human values in 38 million obituaries over 30 years | PNAS How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how perso...

What's a life well-lived? Researchers looked at 38 MILLION obituaries over 30 years to study virtue.

Among the fascinating results, this one is chilling:

After the pandemic, benevolence dropped in popularity and never recovered. In its place, tradition as a virtue experienced a popularity surge.🧪

Gandhi statue in Parliament Square, London. (Prioryman CC-BY-SA 4.0.)

For years I got Gandhi (who is 156 today, the International Day of Non-Violence) backwards. I thought he developed nonviolent methods to end British rule, but this gets the ends and means the wrong way round. It's rather that he had to end British rule to make space for nonviolence. (1/8)

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

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

Title: Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving Authors: Kirstan Brodie, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

"We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?"

- Walter Ong recks idiomatic culture with facts and logic.

I can fixate now at the centre of the screen and imagine a dot flashing to the left of the screen or to its right.

Huh, interesting. I can definitely imagine things in a single hemifield.

Are there any reports of unilateral aphantasia? e.g. people who report being able to imagine things in the right hemifield, but not the left one?

📢 NEW PREPRINT 📢 We show a metacognitive paradox (not blanket deficit!) in OCD: confidence is persistently lower, but fluctuations track evidence more tightly and are nearer Bayes-optimal.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...
🧵👇

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation.

We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation.

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 - The Azrieli Foundation

Interested on working with me on consciousness?… this scholarship is an excellent opportunity to do so. Contact me and let’s think about exciting projects we can do together!
Please share 🙏
azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

Probability weighting arises from boundary repulsions of cognitive noise In both risky choice and perception, people overweight small and underweight large probabilities. While prospect theory models this with a probability weighting function, and Bayesian noisy coding mod...

📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory?
We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.

Today I had a curious encounter with my 4-yo son. He told me he discovered that his Batman action figure could switch the Batman logo to something else. He showed me, touched its arm, shook it and said: “there, it changed.”
The thing is: the logo is fixed and cannot change. So what had happened?

Reminds me of Flavell's work on the appearance-reality distinction
www.jstor.org/stable/11658...

זה נורא

Temporal Binding, Causation, and Agency: Developing a New Theoretical Framework In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized....

Yeah, makes sense. I think you get binding also for non intentional events though, as long as they are causally related. I always thought of it as binding two events into something that resembles more one event with two parts (cause an effect), so I find the contrast really interesting

New preprint,

osf.io/preprints/ps...

a commentary to @anilseth.bsky.social's pice at
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
🧪

🥳

Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference

Zoltan Dienes' Understanding Psychology as a Science has an excellent historical overview, including Popper, Lakatos, Royall, etc.
www.amazon.com/Understandin...
Paul Meehl also comes to mind

Or maybe it's something about measuring the experienced duration between two tones versus measuring the time in which each tone was played?

Cool!! Interesting that it is opposite in direction to temporal/intentional binding. I wonder if it's about causal vs. non-causal events.

(could be as simple as showing the offered bonus next to the offered base-payment in the study info screen, including the proportion of participants who are guaranteed to get it, e.g. "$2 + $1 bonus for one in every 3 participants")

I wish @joinprolific.bsky.social had some monitoring of promised versus paid bonuses. It is currently too easy to promise a bonus for the top-performing participants and not pay anyone. It shouldn't be too hard to have a mechanism that ensures that bonuses are paid as promised.

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

📣📣 **Epic project preprint alert** 📣📣

Blown away by Ellie Pavlick's talk at #CCN2025 about compositionality in transformers. More work like this at CCN please.

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.

When development constricts our moral circle

‼️From Julia Marshall, Matti Wilks, Lucius Caviola & Karri Neldner

Are You a Closet Dualist? Evidence From Brief Implicit Association Task Abstract. Do people tacitly contrast minds and bodies? To find out, here, we gauge Dualism using a brief implicit association task. Participants were asked to determine whether a target word belonged ...

Many people claim they are intuitive physicalists. We decided to test using brief import association task. Results showed strong tacit dualism.
direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...