Francisco Cruz

So grateful for the chance to attend the EASP Summer School organized by @jimaceverett.bsky.social. Huge thanks to @jimaceverett.bsky.social and @mgreinecke.bsky.social for your mentorship in the Moral Psych of AI workstream, and to all of the other amazing students I had the chance to learn from!

🚨Check out our new paper with @boissinesther.bsky.social, Alexandra Delmas & @wimdeneys.bsky.social in Acta Psych!

📹 We show that video debiasing training can boost reasoning accuracy - not just deliberation, but intuition too!

🔓 Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Quick summary👇

Research by @cruzf.bsky.social & @tanialombrozo.bsky.social suggests laypeople may find explanations containing jargon more satisfying despite understanding them less well because they assume the jargon fills gaps in explanations that are otherwise incomplete:
buff.ly/FWgSBaZ

Thank you, @rafmbatista.bsky.social! Let us know if you have any thoughts or questions!

How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon - Nature Human Behaviour Cruz and Lombrozo examine how laypeople make sense of scientific explanations and find that although jargon reduces understanding, for short explanations, jargon makes the explanation more satisfying.

A special thanks to @tanialombrozo.bsky.social, my advisor, without whom this wouldn't be possible, for all the guidance and all she taught me!

And shout-out to my lab mates @keremoktar.bsky.social @caseylewry.bsky.social

Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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This work has implications for the present epistemic landscape, which is becoming increasingly complex. We discuss downstream consequences for conceptualizing overconfidence, delivering science communication, and thinking about human-AI alignment!
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✅ We find that people are poorly calibrated in the perceptions they have about the quality of their own explanations. In particular, miscalibration emerges for those that are exposed to explanations but fail to reproduce it in their own (S4).
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✅ Effects of jargon even when they are misguided (i.e., for made-up jargon) and for naturalistic stimuli (e.g., tweets, S2B-S2C);
✅ We can correct people's biased responses by showing them that gaps persist (e.g., asking them to generate their own explanations, S3A-S3B);
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💡 Main findings 💡
✅ Jargon increases explanatory satisfaction (for circular explanations, Studies 1A-4 [S1A-S4]), but decreases comprehensibility (S1A-S1C);
✅ Jargon increases perceptions of explanations by filling explanatory gaps (S2A-S3B);
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We identified how to reduce this bias as well: Asking people to e.g., generate explanations impacted more their ratings of explanations with jargon. We also observed overconfidence, which we found the most for those that read explanations with jargon, but fail to reproduce them.
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We then tested an explanatory account for this dissociation: People assume the jargon is doing important work, filling in conceptual gaps. So, this boost in quality for explanations with jargon is punctured for more complete explanations, since there are less gaps to fill.
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Across 9 experiments (+6600 participants), we explored a paradox: How do non-experts judge scientific explanations they can’t fully understand? We found that scientific jargon can increase people’s satisfaction with explanations, even though it makes them less comprehensible.
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🚨 I’m incredibly excited to share this one: Latest paper out in Nature Human Behaviour!
Publishing in Nature has always been a goal of mine, and I’m so happy I got there with work developed at Princeton, where I learned so much and grew as a researcher.
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🔬 How did we test this?
We manipulated bias desirability. Biases were framed as desirable (e.g., beneficial to the individual) or undesirable (e.g., harmful). We tested this both within the same bias and across different biases.

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💡 What did we find?
Our study shows that the bias blind spot is smaller when the bias is considered desirable (e.g., being overly positive about close others). The more someone sees a bias as desirable, the smaller their blind spot for that bias.

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🧠 What was our objective?
We aimed to reframe the bias blind spot. While it's often thought to be due to introspection, we tested whether it’s driven by motivations to maintain a positive self-image. People deny their biases but may accept those they see as desirable.

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🔍 What is the Bias Blind Spot?
The Bias Blind Spot is when people recognize biases in others but not in themselves. Despite being subject to the same biases, we often see ourselves as less biased than others.

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Motivated bias blind spot: people confess to more or less bias depending on its desirability - Mind & Society Though people readily claim that others fall prey to several biases, they are less likely to recognize those same biases in themselves – a tendency termed bias blind spot (Pronin et al. in Personality...

🚨 New Research Published! 🚨
"Motivated Bias Blind Spot: People confess to more or less bias depending on its desirability"

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Lay perceptions of psychology: the (mis)match between lay beliefs and explanatory stances People do not think that all psychological phenomena are equally explainable through science: Psychological phenomena associated with a high first-person subjective experience (henceforth, FPSE; i....

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This is highly consequential: If we want the public to better understand and accept psychological science, we should match our explanations to appeal to their intuitions (or alternatively reframe these intuitions gently).

Paper link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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This suggests people default to “prototype” (brain-based) explanations, aligned with their views of low-subjectivity phenomena (but not high-subjectivity ones).

When you give people the right kind of explanation, even these subjective phenomena become more explainable.

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We found that:
1) Low-subjectivity phenomena are seen as more explainable...
2) ...unless people choose what explanation to consider: This effect disappears if high-subjectivity phenomena are paired with intentional explanations.

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People judge explainability not just by what the phenomenon is, but by how well it matches common explanatory templates:
- Brain-based explanations (e.g., neuroscience);
- Intention-based explanations (e.g., beliefs and desires);
- Functional/process-based explanations.

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🧠 New research out now!
Why do people think some psychological phenomena (like falling in love) are harder to explain scientifically than others (like reading a map)?

Turns out it depends on the type of explanation people think about!

Behaviors perceived as reflecting someone's true self were rated as more moral -- and more rooted in the soul (S3)
We also replicated Study 1 and found that people were more likely to attribute soul-based moral actions to themselves than to others (S4)
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Participants read moral dilemmas involving decisions driven by either the soul or the brain. Moral behaviors were more often linked to the soul (Study 1)
Impulses coming from the soul were seen as more reflective of the agent's true self than those stemming from the brain (S2)
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💭 Where do people believe moral and immoral actions come from?
✍️ People tend to credit the soul for moral actions but blame the brain for immoral ones. Why? Because many view their true self as fundamentally moral -- and they associate that true self with the soul.
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The spirit is noble, but the flesh is corrupt: lay beliefs about the bases of (im)moral behavior | Request PDF Request PDF | On Apr 23, 2025, Francisco Cruz and others published The spirit is noble, but the flesh is corrupt: lay beliefs about the bases of (im)moral behavior | Find, read and cite all the resear...

🚨 New paper out! 🚨
"The spirit is noble, but the flesh is corrupt: lay beliefs about the bases of (im)moral behavior"
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
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Amazing news, @steverathje.bsky.social! Best of luck!

The Anne Anastasi General Psychology Graduate Student Award The Anne Anastasi awards, named for APA past-president and funded by the Anne Anastasi Foundation, are given to two outstanding psychology graduate students, one in the first two years of graduate stu...

Learn more about this award here: apadiv1.org/awards-grant...

I'd also like to sincerely thank all my colleagues and mentors, namely @tapalma.bsky.social -- for all their guidance and encouragement!

Doing research is not a sole endeavor and exchanging ideas and learning from one another is also part of what I believe interdisciplinarity means. 2/3