In honor of May Day, here's an article I recently published with @anagantman.bsky.social & @kcarriere.bsky.social. We find that support for unions is high in the US, but not generalized; worldviews, ideology, and type of labor differentiate support. Read more at doi.org/10.1111/pops...

If asked to draw a person's portrait, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Why is observational drawing so hard? In a new paper, @judithfan.bsky.social and I answer: it's the limitations of human vision. Learning to draw is learning skills to overcome them. aaronhertzmann.com/2026/03/23/d... 1/

Why Drawing is Hard: Visual Limitations and the Skills to Overcome Them

If asked to draw a picture of a tree or a person in front of them, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Thirty years ago, two psychologists pointed out that this should be surprising. They reasoned ...

aaronhertzmann.com

Stoked to share our new lab pub led by the amazing @normanjzeng.bsky.social ! After watching multi-party agent events, infants expect agents to preserve their moral "role" in a resource distribution task. Indiv. variability predicted by infants' social contact. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Infants make moral character inferences in multi-agent social interactions - Communications Psychology

Using eye-gaze methods, this research investigated infants’ ability to make moral character inferences. For a wide range of moral roles, infants could use an agent’s past moral behavior to revise thei...

nature.com

love to see One Battle After Another winning things, not least bc I think Lockjaw shows us what the psychology of authoritarianism is really all about--treating state power as a means to an end i wrote about authoritarianism, OBAA, & The Lives of Others for PSYOP: open.substack.com/pub/anagantm...

Steven J. Lockjaw is the villain for the moment

What One Battle After Another gets right about the psychology of authoritarianism

open.substack.com

New preprint!! Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so... Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.

Next substack post is up: Is the Garden of Eden really a parable about the evolution of monogamy? A post mostly about Cat Bohannon's awesome book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Is the Garden of Eden a story about monogamy?

On Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

open.substack.com

Social Identities Shape Belief in True & False Information In our new paper (N=1,459), people randomly assigned to a minimal groups were more likely to trust + believe ingroup members. This was only true among people who valued their ingroup or had a strong need to belong. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Next substack post is up: Is the Garden of Eden really a parable about the evolution of monogamy? A post mostly about Cat Bohannon's awesome book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Is the Garden of Eden a story about monogamy?

On Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

open.substack.com

Nguyen’s The Score & Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches are a perfect set. The Score is about value capture (when metrics corrode their purpose) and Matches is about lighting a fire everyday and noticing stuff (i call it value release in the post) More here! anagantman.substack.com/p/bean-count...

Bean-counting by firelight

on C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score & Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches

anagantman.substack.com

introducing my substack PSYOP! both psychology and art & culture can help us understand better what it's like to be a person in the world. i think they don't interact enough and this newsletter is a place for me to try to pull those two worlds together anagantman.substack.com/p/introducin...

introducing psyop

a newsletter about psychology by way of culture

anagantman.substack.com

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/11

The psychology of everyday authoritarianism: Authoritarians will pay money to impose arbitrary rules on others

ana gantman@anagantman.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...

We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help? New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis. osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 How do people's mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization? We find that people spontaneously construct goal-dependent causal abstractions that compress experience to privilege relevant information. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 🔗 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Here's a link to access our article "People Can Find Their True Selves Outside Moral Pursuits" (Cognition) for free for the next 50 days @jowylie.bsky.social @anagantman.bsky.social 📄 📎 authors.elsevier.com/c/1lznW2Hx2-... #moralpsychology #philsky

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications

Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

nature.com

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social) Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

We propose that the everyday psychology of rules and 3rd party punishment is at the core of authoritarianism Our view posits no new constructs, is ideology-agnostic, & considers relevant only interactions w the state See our new working paper "Authoritarianism in Action" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation. We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

One common view in moral psychology is “the primacy of the moral” - the view that people think your moral traits are what’s most fundamental about you These new studies challenge that view, suggesting that people sometimes see artistic creation as just as fundamental as morality

ana gantman@anagantman.bsky.social · 12mo ago

you're having a sliding doors moment--you can either become a great artist or a great philanthropist. what path will make you feel like you've found your true self? @jowylie.bsky.social & @mattlindauer.bsky.social and i find that arts provide a unique one static1.squarespace.com/static/679ee...

you're having a sliding doors moment--you can either become a great artist or a great philanthropist. what path will make you feel like you've found your true self? @jowylie.bsky.social & @mattlindauer.bsky.social and i find that arts provide a unique one static1.squarespace.com/static/679ee...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025

Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

journals.sagepub.com

Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06950

@anagantman.bsky.social @jowylie.bsky.social and I are starting to study everyday revenge. Have you ever successfully gotten back at someone after being wronged? We would love to hear about it. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #cognition

Everyday Revenge

We are interested in stories of everyday revenge—cases where you successfully got back at someone after being wronged. Please think up an experience of when you took revenge and tell us about it. Pl...

docs.google.com

@paulbloomatyale.bsky.social @jowylie.bsky.social, and I are starting to study everyday revenge. Have you ever successfully got back at someone after being wronged? We would love to hear about it: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #cognition

Everyday Revenge

We are interested in stories of everyday revenge—cases where you successfully got back at someone after being wronged. Please think up an experience of when you took revenge and tell us about it. Pl...

docs.google.com

In this finally out (!) paper, I argue no—and cognitive science backs this up. We can keep the orthodox rationalist view of belief *and* recognize the difficulties in changing minds. The key is thinking of belief as requiring a *capacity* (not a reliable disposition) to respond to evidence.

Resistant Beliefs, Responsive Believers - Volume 122, Issue 4, April 2025

Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capaciti...

pdcnet.org

🥂 officially promoted to associate prof of psych at brooklyn college & the CUNY grad center--and appointed in the philosophy department at the grad center 🥂