Vanessa Lazaro

Developing Intuitions That Close Friends Know the Content of Each Other’s Minds Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

The Effects of K-12 Computer Science Education Policies on Postsecondary CS Participation States have increasingly adopted policies to promote computer science education at the elementary and secondary levels. These policies are intended, in part, to promote the pursuit of computer science...

We have a new EdWorkingPaper up, from @edutuan.bsky.social, @haeryunkim.bsky.social, Chanh Lam, Mariam Saffar Pérez, Jinyoung Hur, Colleen Lewis, and me:

The Effects of K-12 Computer Science Education Policies on Postsecondary CS Participation edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1301

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, The Cognition, Affect, and Temperament Lab, College of the Liberal Arts, Department of Psychology-2 APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

My lab has an open post-doc position!

We will begin reviewing applications as they come in.

The post-doc will work with a vibrant research team at Penn State in the Department of Psychology and the Child Study Center.

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

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If this is helpful for anyone going on the social psych tenure track job market in US, here are my Colby (in 2018) and UIC (2023) statements: osf.io/ef7s3/files/...

My lab website has links to other people's materials. Of course the markets were very different back then.
www.pbandjlab.com/resources

Call for Papers Indomitable Science: Social Cognition Scholarship amid Disruption.docx Call for Papers: Special Collection Indomitable Science: Social Cognition Scholarship amid Disruption Deadline for Letters of Intent: October 15, 2025 (https://bit.ly/4mlowtf) Guest Editors: Gale...

Social Cognition invites papers for a special issue on disrupted scholarship guest edited by Galen Bodenhausen, Jacqueline Chen, & Franki Kung.

bit.ly/3HkcyBf

Social dominance orientation: The motivational basis of intergroup inequality Group-based hierarchies govern much of social life, from relations between ethnic groups to those between nation-states. We review three decades of re…

Freshly dropped paper on SDO you'll want to check out 👇

By Arnold Ho, @nourkteily.bsky.social @jsskeffington.bsky.social & @lottethomsendk.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #PrejudiceResearch #PsychSciSky #SocialPsychology #PoliticalPsych

(to this crew: Jim would be proud!)

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

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? 🧵

I just got an email informing me that my Annual Review on structural racism with @tyson-brown.bsky.social and @pahoman.bsky.social is open access. So, download away.

Our Annual Review of Sociology article on conceptualizing and measuring structural racism is now available.

Get it while studying racism is still legal. @tyson-brown.bsky.social @pahoman.bsky.social

(also, lots of great articles are in this volume).

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

In advance of next year's (likely dire) job market, here are the 2024-2025 numbers from the psych job wiki: the overall number of tenure-track job listings in psychology and neuroscience fell slightly, from 860 to 822 (this doesn't include canceled searches, which are often not properly reported).

BREAKING: At least 62 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza despite a “tactical pause” to allow aid into the besieged enclave, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

🔴 LIVE updates: aje.io/pag0eh

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🚨 New article out!
How robust is the psychology of social class?
Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries.
Published in Nature Human Behaviour:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence From a Corpus of 98 Shows From 1960 to 2018 - Andrea C. Vial, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ruyuan Zuo, Shreya Haval... Biased media content shapes children’s social concepts and identities. We examined gender bias in a large corpus of scripts from 98 children’s television progra...

🔥Excited to share our new paper in PsychScience! Shout out to best-ever collaborators Aida Davani, @ruyuan-zuo.bsky.social, @shreyahavaldar.bsky.social, Eleanor Chestnut, @mdehghani.bsky.social & @andreicimpian.bsky.social 🧵1/8…
doi.org/10.1177/0956...

Newly accepted in PSPB! We examined whether Asian and Black Americans perceived one another through a zero-sum lens. Inspired by the SCOTUS affirmative action decisions, I wanted to know if Asians thought they were losing to Black people and how this mindset affects coalition
osf.io/preprints/ps...

More than 100 humanitarian groups warn of mass starvation in Gaza A joint statement says the Israeli government's "siege" has left aid supplies "totally depleted".

This is deeply shameful. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get aid in the past 8 weeks. Israel must immediately cease these shootings & lift the blockade. Congress must pass the UNRWA Funding Emergency Restoration Act to help distribute aid in Gaza

www.bbc.com/news/article...

📣 Heads-up that our amazing dept (Berkeley Psych) is anticipating hiring *two* TT Asst Profs this Fall, under the themes of (1) Social & Personality Psychology, and (2) Biological Basis of Behavior.

Official job ads coming soon...

Send qs for (1) to Iris Mauss/Serena Chen, (2) to Linda Wilbrecht

🎉New paper out @Psychological Review on the neuroscience of intergroup contact🎉

Led by the fantastic @margaretrwelte.bsky.social ‬and Jas Cloutier!

@apajournals.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Deadline coming up for @sylviapperry.bsky.social's call for manuscript proposals!

Learn more about the Special Issue on Intergroup Allyship in Current Directions and submit by July 18
www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Beyond Identity: A Framework for the Study of Social Inequalities and Social Change We present a framework for the study of social inequalities and social change. This framework aims to motivate researchers to move beyond the predominant focus on isolated pairs of identity-based g...

I am very happy that a first article from a project Johannes Ullrich and I have been working on for quite a while is now published in Psychological Inquiry (open access):

doi.org/10.1080/1047...

a cartoon of homer simpson and bart simpson sitting on a couch with the words join us above them . Alt: a cartoon of homer simpson and bart simpson sitting on a couch with the words join us above them .

Just found out I can put this gif on my lab website so this is gonna be a game changer 😂 Anyway I will be reviewing PhD applications for UIC social-personality psych area to start in Fall 2026, so please let your students know. More info on my website: www.pbandjlab.com/team

Pleased to announce my new open access paper out in Developmental Psychology:
The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind”

with @xphilosopher.bsky.social and @ebonawitz.bsky.social

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-25569-001.html

#CogSci #PsychSciSki #DevSci

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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/...

Join Us | Elenbaas Lab In the Social Development Lab, we study how children think about people, groups, and society. The lab is supervised by Dr. Laura Elenbaas.

I’m hiring a lab manager! Full time, starting this summer. Perfect for a BA/BS grad or post-bac with child or family research experience interested in developmental psych or HDFS. Complete details and application link here: www.elenbaaslab.com/join #devpsyc #socialpsyc #familysci #psychjobs

JENA, La. (AP) — Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil has been released from an immigration jail after 104 days in custody.

Colorful quilt of a nighttime scene with Harriet Tubman in an orange jacket and purple dress carrying a rifle. She is leading other figures who walk behind her.

Harriet Tubman #quilt by my Mom, Vera P. Hall, who makes quilts celebrating Black people who fought for their own freedom. This seems to be the crowd favorite of the “We Didn’t Wait for Freedom” series. Happy #Juneteenth #quilting

"I was praying for you to stay alive! Why did this happen to you?"

Injured Palestinian girl Luna Rasras from Gaza embraces her father’s body after an Israeli strike on their tent in Khan Younis killed him and her siblings.