Ryan Carlson

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Deeply honored by this recognition from @psychscience.bsky.social, and to be in the company of scientists whose work I greatly admire! A big thank you to lab members, collaborators and mentors, past and present for the work we do together!

a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fall

the Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳

my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception

currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science!

reach out if you're interested 😊

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth.

Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word!

More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

Civil conversations reduce attitude polarization more than people anticipate.
People with opposing attitudes toward cats and dogs, cancel culture, and Joe Biden underestimated how much their own and others’ attitudes would depolarize in spoken conversations.
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Model-based algorithms shape automatic evaluative processing | PNAS Computational theories of reinforcement learning suggest that two families of algorithm—model-based and model-free—tightly map onto the classic dis...

A key takeaway from 20+ years of computational RL is: model-free=automatic, model-based=deliberate. My new paper w/ @benedek.bsky.social challenges this view, suggesting that MB algos are more ubiquitous, & automatic processing more sophisticated, than currently thought: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What makes people feel entitled to rewards—the effort they put into their work or the outcomes they achieve?

Out now in PNAS; with Jin Kim and Jared Wong:

Achievement.

Effort seems to matter very little (if at all).

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Introspection has gotten a bad rap over the years. Here we show that people have more insight into the algorithms behind their decisions than we tend to assume. Thrilled to see this work out at Nature Comms with the always brilliant @thatadammorris.bsky.social!

Introspective access to value-based multi-attribute choice processes - Nature Communications People routinely choose between multi-attribute options, such as which movie to watch. Here, the authors show people often have accurate insight into their choices, challenging the notion that people ...

Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper at @natcomms.nature.com challenges this view. With @rcarl.bsky.social sky.social, @hedykober.bsky.social y.social, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵

A new and fresh paper calls for a fresh start on a new platform. Hi y'all! 👋

Check out my paper with @spillersas.bsky.social and @krajbichlab.bsky.social - we look at the multi-faceted role of attention in opportunity cost neglect, using eye-tracking + computational modeling. Read more at the link!

📢 I am recruiting a PhD student to start Fall 2024 @UofNH!

Interested in gender and other social groups, language, NLP...? Check out the Join Us! section of our lab website baileypsychlab.com for a letter to prospective students w/ more info and FAQs. Apply by 1/15/24! Please RT 🙏