Amitai Shenhav

📣 New preprint from the SCIMaP team!

Across three studies, we show that communicating the economic impact of NIH funding cuts—especially with interactive quizzes and maps—decreases approval and motivates action to oppose the cuts, across the political spectrum. 🧵 1/8
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to announce that my lab has moved to UC Berkeley Dept of Neuroscience and Dept of Statistics! I will be continuing to collaborate with colleagues and students in TX at UT Austin and Baylor College of Medicine, and will start new collabs in the Bay. Will be taking new grad students this fall!

Sign a letter demanding that UC and the state of California refuse to appease the fascists any further:

tinyurl.com/ucstandup

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

Congrats Nicole!! 🎉

Confused about why children in Gaza are starving? Listen to Jon Stewart's interview with the amazing ‪@peterbeinart.bsky.social‬: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5kX...
Hoping to help? An amazing group of MIT students is getting aid to Gazan kids & university students. Donate here:
mutualaidgaza.org#donate

Shameless advertising here, but if you have been asking yourself this question and are attending @cogscisociety.bsky.social come check out Ziwei’s talk tomorrow on her paper that received Cog Sci’s Computational Modeling Prize for Higher-Level Cognition!! 🎉🎉
bsky.app/profile/shen...

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Come and see our work at #cogsci2025!
Ziwei Cheng will be presenting a talk “Incentive Effects Capture Variability in Task-General Control Allocation” on Fri 8/1 (4-5:30 pm, Cognition 7)
🔗Paper link: escholarship.org/content/qt7b...

Let's please keep the remaining staff at NIH, NSF, etc in our thoughts even as you lose sleep over your own lab and scientific career.

They are enduring pure chaos to try to hold the fort.

See snapshot from wapo.st/4feKKuu (gift 🔗) saying they are "barely holding it together"

Psych Academic Job Market Slack Interest Form

(please share widely!) With the start of August quickly approaching, I wanted to announce that the usual slack for fellow people on the Psych Academic Job Market for the coming cycle has been activated. If you are interested, feel free to fill out this form to join!
forms.gle/2DBgs8S1fktS...

Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, Tenure Track Department Cognitive Science Vassar College is dedicated to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees and welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds. Deci...

Vassar College is hiring a tenure track assistant professor in cognitive science. vassar.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Vassar...

I'll be at #CogSci2025 - happy to chat about the position and life at Vassar.

@cogscisociety.bsky.social conference:

Friday August 1st at 4:00pm, Salon 2 - join
@sciencehomecoming.bsky.social and two other speakers at the symposium, 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓

The Learning Lab is heading to CogSci 2025 (@cogscisociety.bsky.social) to share our latest research! Come say hello!

If you’re heading to SF for #CogSci2025 this week and are interested in mobile EEG or spatial memory, come check out my talk on Thursday! (Talks 11: EEG, 2:15pm, Salon 5).

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share!
mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵

Assistant Professor - Open Field - Sociology University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Berkeley Sociology is hiring faculty! Sept 1 application deadline. Two positions: (1) open area junior search. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05013, (2) associate or full professor in Anti-Black Racism and Social Inclusion aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05012 Please help spread the word!

📣 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

The most important story in the world right now.

Public media is under threat. Millions depend on the NPR Network every day. Silencing journalism is one way to silence truth and erode the power of the people.

Today, President Trump signed a bill into law that will eliminate $1.1B of federal funding for public media. This devastating act tipped the threat against journalism in America into a crisis.

Millions depend on the NPR Network. Now, we’re counting on you.

Donate here: n.pr/458sOhq

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Opinion | Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/o...

A Novel Approach-Avoidance Task to Study Decision Making Under Outcome Uncertainty To behave adaptively, people need to integrate information about probabilistic outcomes and balance drives to approach positive outcomes and avoid negative outcomes. However, questions remain about ho...

Our newest preprint “A novel approach-avoidance task to study decision making under outcome uncertainty” investigates the dynamics of approach-avoid decisions!

Check out www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/..., led by Ziwei Cheng and @nadjagingjehli.bsky.social

How is it possible that my otherwise thoughtful and compassionate colleagues can watch the total destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of it inhabitants, war crimes that the US is directly responsible for, and do nothing?
I just don't get it.

Congress eliminated public media funding. At a time of deep division, public media brings us together.

Help keep it strong. Join our monthly donors today: n.pr/458sOhq

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

Excited to share my new lab website!

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

New published paper with Ham Huang and @actlab.bsky.social! @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Considering What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Expectations and Confidence Guide Value Integration in Value-Based Decision-Making Abstract. When making decisions, we often have more information about some options than others. Previous work has shown that people are more likely to choose options that they look at more and those t...

Our newest paper, led by Romy Froemer
and @fredcallaway.bsky.social‬, is now out in Open Mind: “Considering What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Expectations and Confidence Guide Value Integration in Value-Based Decision-Making”

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

Important PSA:

#NeuroEconomics is an "or" not an "and" descriptor. You can be neuro, econ, or a little of both and we want to hear your work at Neuroecon this fall!

(You can also be a psychologist, or consumer behavior-ist and we want to hear you too - go ahead ask me how I'd know 😁)