Vlad Chituc

CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors.

ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't

CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart.

ISILDUR: true

a logo for the carolina tar heels with a ram head ALT: a logo for the carolina tar heels with a ram head

UNC is hiring in Quantitative Psychology! Assistant Professor (tenure-track). Please share widely! Find details here: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

We're hiring!

infant data from experiment 1

conceptual schema for different habituation models

title page

results from experiment 2 with adults

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

ggplot2 hex with tada emoji. Text: Join the v4.0.0 release party with Teun van den Brand and the ggplot2 extenders, Oct 3 at 3pm Et, bit.ly/join-gg-extenders

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 is here! 🎉

This major update includes a foundational rewrite of S7 and user benefits such as smarter labeling and a revamped theming system.

Check the details: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09...

BONUS: Join the release party on Oct 3, 3pm ET. bit.ly/join-gg-extenders

#RStats

How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment Moral judgment is central to both everyday life and cognitive science, but how can it be studied with quantitative precision? By far the most direct a…

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

"How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment"

📢New paper from: @vladchituc.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, & Brian Scholl

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Psychophysics meets moral psych! In the best possible way!

I worry what this means for clinical research and patient reported outcomes, which often measure things like pain on a very simple 1-10 scale, often without clear anchoring.

Such important work by
@vladchituc.bsky.social!

Distributed range adaptation in human parietal encoding of numbers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.25.675916v1

Bonus: these scenarios are obviously and intentionally exaggerated, and it's not clear how widespread these problems are in the actual moral psych literature. But if you're interested in using these methods (or would like to be involved in a large-scale replication project) please reach out!

I love this paper, and I'm thrilled that it's finally out. You can read it at the following link for the next month or so, and for free on my site anytime after that

Journal: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lrB72Hx2-...

Preprint: vladimir-chituc.squarespace.com/s/Chituc-EtA...

7/7

We should hope that the measures used by our discipline can reveal something as obvious as the fact that a college prank (however cruel) is not nearly as bad as murder. But only one method consistently does this: magnitude estimation.

6/7

So while self-report ratings only show that a war crime is worse than a prank when scenarios are presented together (or within-subjects), you get the obvious difference with magnitude estimation whether you're rating the scenarios together or apart (between-subjects).

5/7

So how can we avoid this? Use a psychophysical method called "magnitude estimation" (where you make ratio judgments in reference to a benchmark stimulus): e.g. if stealing a wallet is a 10, then something twice as bad would be a 20, half as bad would be a 5, and so on.

4/7

This is obvious for everyday adjectives—if I say I have a small house and a big dog, you know I'm not saying that the latter is larger than the former.

And the same holds true for immorality.

(Also: this project has my favorite joke that I've ever snuck into a paper).

3/7

To state the obvious: college students don't really think a cruel prank is worse than an internationally recognized war crime. Instead, the words "very immoral" just mean very different things in these very different contexts.

2/7

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

“AI will kill everyone” is not an argument. It’s a worldview. How rational is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s prophecy?

If you read just one article about AI this weekend, let it be this.

I've spent the last six years researching tech risk, existential risk, and AI. This is one of the best things I've read in that space. #AI #AIRisk #TechRisk #TechEthics #AIEthics #XRisk

Colin McGinn --

I hadn't read Turing's 1950 "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" (where he introduced the imitation game, a.k.a. the Turing test) since the advent of LLMs. It's so striking that people asked so many relevant questions about artificial intelligence right at the inception of the field.

This was such a fun project! Dozens of philosophers wrote philosophical arguments trying to get people to donate more to charity, and we ask: Do any of these work? Which ones work best? Why?

Genuinely powerful words to live by.

Almost like valuing AI companies as if they could replace the vast majority of the workforce was premature and stupid !!

When there’s definitely not a bubble that’s definitely not getting perilously close to popping.

two hex stickers for the artpack R package. both have a background of rainbow-colored waves with the artpack logo on top of it. One sticker is a regular print, the other is holographic.

🎉 My R gen art package, artpack 0.2.0, is now on CRAN! You can read about the updates here -> buff.ly/s2vcm8g

2 years of dev work that made me realize I love development.

To celebrate, I've hidden hex stickers around #positconf2025 - some are holographic ✨! Can't find one? Ask me for one!"

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

thanks for the kind words! glad you liked it :)

"...and what do you think we do?" On dumb mistakes, dumber benchmarks, and how we know you're not a pattern matcher.

If you want to know whether AI models are smart, you shouldn't be looking at the kinds of things that only smart people can do well—chess or Go or logical proofs.

You should look at the things that even the dumbest people can *still* do well.