🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search

If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238
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I’m recruiting #PhD students to join my Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social! We study how infants learn about the natural world from others 🌱 If you’re interested in #devpsych, #EvPsych, and #infantstudies, please reach out and apply! More info below (1/2)

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers:
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

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):

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Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

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A new study by Zach Horne et al. combines history of science and psychology experiments to document the appeal of 'intrinsic' explanations: scientists and laypeople are drawn to explanations that appeal to an object's inherent properties.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Reply to Quillien: Intuitive preferences and interpretive humility in intentionality judgments | PNAS Reply to Quillien: Intuitive preferences and interpretive humility in intentionality judgments

I also recommend Gervais et al.'s thoughtful reply: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

(As they highlight, their broader arguments about cultural evolution and religion are not the target of my critique, and their cross-cultural findings remain intriguing despite the interpretive difficulties)

So this commentary is my small contribution to the skeptic's side of that broader debate.

Self-reports are better measurement instruments than implicit measures - Nature Reviews Psychology Implicit measures are widely used because they are assumed to be superior to self-reports. In this Perspective, Corneille and Gawronski challenge this view and argue that claims about disadvantages of...

One motivation for writing this commentary: There is a large appetite in psychology for methods for covertly measuring people's implicit attitudes and preferences. But these efforts have mostly failed to live to the hype: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The problem is that this strategy would also allow us to 'infer' that people have intuitive preferences for nuclear explosions, or sending people to concentration camps:

People tend to attribute more intentionality to agents that did something bad. It is tempting to use this effect as a way to covertly measure people's implicit attitudes, as Will Gervais and colleagues do in a recent paper on attitudes toward atheism:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences | PNAS Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes?

I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

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Fantastic opportunity to join the cogsci community at Edinburgh:

Imagine if all the money academics pour into OA fees at for-profit publishing corporations went instead to academic societies, which exist to support science; or to university presses, which exist to support academia

A bar chart showing frequencies of answers to the question "Is the mind composed of innate, domain-specialized modules?" with N=197. The most prominent bars are no response (~60), yes (~30) and yo (~30). The rest of the entries are funny, e.g. "I hope so."

Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…

An information bottleneck view of social stereotype use Author(s): Taylor-Davies, Max Louis; Quillien, Tadeg | Abstract: For decades, social psychologists have wondered about the cognitive foundations of social stereotype use. Arguments have generally cent...

Link to the paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/86c4...

For more in this line of research see also our model of resource-limited Theory of Mind: bsky.app/profile/tade...

Overall, our work makes sense of why people tend to rely on social stereotypes more than they should if they were idealized Bayesian observers: they tend to preferentially allocate their limited cognitive resources to encoding group membership information.

We also find that the optimal policy exhibits the same 'outgroup homogeneity bias' as people: it tends to represent outgroup members are more similar to each other than they are. Again, this is especially the case when cognitive resources are very limited.

This explains why social stereotypes often act as 'energy-saving' devices for prediction, as social psychologists have found: people are for example more likely to use stereotypes when they are under cognitive load.

Our key result: under limited resources, the optimal policy preferentially encodes information about group membership (blue) and tends to discard individuating information (teal).

This tendency only reverses if group membership has very low task relevance.

We study agents who have to predict the behavior of other agents.

Agents have limited cognitive resources: they can only extract so much information from the environment, and have to prioritize which information to encode (group membership or individuating info).

When predicting someone's behavior, people typically rely on both:
-individuating information (e.g. what that person did in the past),
-group membership,
We want to explain why people integrate these two types of information as they do, working from first principles.

Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints:
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Recent studies suggest that manipulating "growth mindset" might not improve students' academic performance

This new research suggests that it has a different effect. Growth mindset makes people more inclined to *blame* students for their failures

escholarship.org/content/qt4k...

Really loving this kind of engagement between the psychology and philosophy of causation.

So much better than psychologists re-explaining how people are just oh so irrational and philosophers examining their intuitions about increasingly elaborate tales of rock throwing and firing squads 😉

A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: commentary on Thanawala & Erb (2024) Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the view that people have multiple concepts of causation...

Our pre-print is at osf.io/preprints/ps...

Code is available at osf.io/acmsh/

For more background on the CES model: quillienlab.github.io/Quillien%20&...

For more on double prevention see e.g. quillienlab.github.io/O%27Neill,%2...

Revisiting causal pluralism: Intention, process, and dependency in cases of double prevention Causal pluralism proposes that humans can reason about causes and effects in terms of both dependency and process relations, depending on the scenario…

There is more in the paper, including implications for debates over causal pluralism, double prevention, etc.

I also highly recommend the original paper by Thanawala & Erb: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
And their thoughtful response to our piece: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The assumption that people preferentially replace recent events in counterfactual simulation has wide empirical support even outside of the domain of causal judgment, making our account parsimonious: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...