What do rubber ducks have to do with learning and AI? You can find out in my TEDx talk, released today as an Editor’s Pick at the YouTube TED Channel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbiy...

How you can learn in a world of information overload | Tania Lombrozo | TEDxNewEngland

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

youtube.com

I love this paper. I went in skeptical and came out convinced.

Benedek Kurdi@benedek.bsky.social · 3w ago

Are the mental contents underlying implicit evaluations accessible to conscious introspection? Prior studies show high predictive accuracy, leading to a growing consensus that people can introspectively access their implicit biases. New paper out in JPSP! 🧵🧵🧵

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Abstract. Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex…

direct.mit.edu

“Widely-Used Measures of Overconfidence Are Confounded With Ability” papers.ssrn.com/abstract=446... Now accepted at Management Science! 🤓📄🧵 1/

I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

Thrilled this is out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵 Do we have 2 kinds of beliefs? Some beliefs seem insensitive to evidence and rarely guide behavior, etc. To explain this, several theories divide belief into 2 types. I argue the explanation isn't in the *mind* but in the *world*

In the Mind or in the World? Types of Beliefs and the Locality of Evidence

People’s beliefs appear to be divisible into two distinct types. Some beliefs refer directly to the observable world, readily guide behavior, and are easily revised when challenged. Others, includi...

tandfonline.com

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Factive mindreading reflects the optimal use of limited cognitive resources

Abstract. The capacity to represent the mental states of other individuals, known as ‘mindreading’ or ‘theory of mind’, is key to successful social predict

royalsocietypublishing.org

New paper alert! (doi.org/10.1093/jcr/...) How much does a no-choice option really change what people choose in surveys and experiments?

You think you know what belief is? No! At best you have an accidentally true opinion, unless you've read Jonathan Lewis-Jong's and my edited collection, The Nature of Belief, hot off the press at OUP. (Also available open access at OUP's website.)

I'm delighted that our paper, "Risk Matters Less When Options Are Apples-to-Oranges: The Translate-and-Accommodate Model" (Evan Weingarten, Yuval Rottenstreich, and George Wu) has just been accepted at Psychological Review. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 1/N

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Plural Causes

Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

direct.mit.edu

Not all authors are equal: Moral judgments of plagiarism from AI and human sources 
‼️Recent work from Calahndra Brake, Kang Lee & Ori Friedman

Not All Authors Are Equal: Moral Judgments of Plagiarism From AI and Human Sources

Abstract. Generative AI tools are increasingly being used for creative and academic work. How do people morally evaluate plagiarism involving AI-generated content, and do they judge it differently tha...

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When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

New working paper I’ve got out (w/ Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social ) Still a work in progress, but we’re excited about the idea and are currently working to extend it. Thanks, Gary, for sharing it!

Gary Marcus@garymarcus.bsky.social · 5mo ago

LLMs are an epistemic nightmare. open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper (forthcoming in Cognition): Context-dependent effects of branches in decisions under risk authors.elsevier.com/a/1mXL%7E2Hx... Key finding: when people choose between risky options, they’re more likely to pick the one with more distinct probabilistic outcomes (“more pathways to winning”).

Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: Dietvorst, B. J. (in press). Understanding people's preferences for predictions: People prioritize being right over minimizing how wrong they are in expectation. Management Science. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc...

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/ www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🚨From Jay Naborn & Jonathan E. Bogard: The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Excited by our new work estimating the empowerment of LLM-based agents in text and code. Empowerment is the causal influence an agent has over its environment and measures an agent's capabilities without requiring knowledge of its goals or intentions.

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle

Where were you when you first learned about implicit bias?

open.substack.com

What makes people feel entitled to rewards—the effort they put into their work or the outcomes they achieve? Out now in PNAS; with Jin Kim and Jared Wong: Achievement. Effort seems to matter very little (if at all). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵

Really proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social. We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…

Our incredibly short (5 page) paper on intuitions about consent — with Joanna Demaree-Cotton and @rosesomm.bsky.social We find cases where people agree that both: (a) There’s a sense in a which a person clearly consented (b) In deeper sense, she did not consent at all osf.io/63d8s

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...