David Melnikoff

@d-melnikoff.bsky.social

Assistant Prof. at Stanford GSB

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! 🧵🧵🧵

The tide is turning against a major idea in social psychology: that implicit evaluations reflect mental content that lies beyond conscious awareness. This view is being reconsidered in light of mounting evidence that people can predict their own implicit evaluations with high accuracy. However, there are reasons to question whether such predictive accuracy reflects introspective access. First, prior studies have relied almost exclusively on familiar targets (e.g., racial groups), allowing predictions to be informed by background knowledge (e.g., knowing that a group is stigmatized) rather than introspection. Second, implicit and explicit evaluations have been highly correlated in prior work, enabling accurate predictions simply by assuming that implicit evaluations mirror explicit ones. Here, we report eight experiments (five pre-registered; N = 6,794) designed to minimize these nonintrospective routes to predictive accuracy. We introduced participants to novel targets and shifted implicit and explicit evaluations of these targets in opposite directions, rendering explicit evaluations an unreliable cue. Under these conditions, predictive accuracy ranged from low to nonexistent; participants frequently anticipated shifts in their implicit evaluations in the opposite direction of the actual change. These results generalized across two learning paradigms (impression formation and attribute conditioning), two implicit evaluation measures (Implicit Association Test and evaluative priming task), and between-participant and within-participant designs. We consider multiple interpretations of these findings, including the possibility that implicit evaluations reflect mental content that is largely or even entirely inaccessible to conscious awareness.

Unless I'm missing something, lots of human RL work relies on flawed implementations of reward revaluation (RR). RR should alter the agent's reward function (e.g., by sating it, making food less rewarding) while holding the transition structure fixed. Many "RR" manipulations don't 🧵

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

Postdoc and Research Technician Positions — Rutledge Lab

Now hiring a postdoc and a research technician with an interest in neuroeconomics or computational psychiatry.

rutledgelab.org

The International Social Cognition Network (ISCON) is pleased to announce Dr. April Bailey as the 2025 winner of the Early Career Award! Dr. Bailey is a Lecturer of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She earned her B.A. from Colgate University and her PhD in 2019 from Yale University.

I'm recruiting a grad student! My lab at NYU (psych dept) studies the computational basis of moral cognition and aims to build AI systems that are aligned with human values. Now admitting a PhD student for Fall 2026. Apps due 12/1. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

Sydney Levine - Open Positions

Graduate Students (PhD program) I will be accepting PhD students through the NYU psychology department for the current application cycle (for admission in Fall 2026). My lab is joint between the Co...

sites.google.com

It was great to hear from Brian Leahy (brianleahy.net) in the devo lunch at Stanford today!! He presented a beautiful set of studies that suggest that many 4-year-old children have a minimal concept of possibility: they simulate only once and treat the outcome as a fact. 🎱⬅️➡️🤔💭💡

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The Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Science of Motivation has opened nominations for the editorship of Motivation Science, a multidisciplinary journal that publishes significant contributions to the study of motivation.

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I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share: phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

Research Coordinator, Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab in Graduate School of Education, Stanford, California, United States

The Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) seeks a full-time Research Coordinator (acting lab manager) to help launch and coordinate the Minds,.....

phxc1b.rfer.us

🚨 New paper alert! (slightly belated) We (with @joshcjackson.bsky.social) suggest that complex technologies, as they need several (often many) people to use them, require innovations that distribute cognition to help regulate cognitive load and coordinate. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition

Over the last decade, new research has shown how human collectives can develop technologies that no single individual could discover on their own. How…

sciencedirect.com

As wildfires burn at home in 🇵🇹 and here in CA, we have a new paper that finds: exposure to fires doesn’t necessarily predict greater support for climate change mitigation. But people closest to the 2021-2022 fires do prioritize personal adaptive action. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Paying attention and paying the costs: wildfires in the American West - Climatic Change

Preliminary estimates suggest that the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires could be the costliest disaster in U.S. history to date when accounting for both direct and indirect losses. As personal exper...

link.springer.com

Stanford GSB is hiring a behavioral research coordinator! Fantastic option for a pre-doc. In addition to the faculty and students, the lab director Nick Hall has been there since I was running my grad school expts- he's great, and super knowledgeable. careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/researc...

Research Coordinator in Graduate School of Business, Stanford, California, United States

Stanford Graduate School of Business Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB) has built a global reputation based on its immersive and innovative....

careersearch.stanford.edu

Job announcement 📢 @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction! Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions! apply.interfolio.com/165809

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Shawn Rhoads@shawnrhoadsphd.com · last yr.

📢 @markkho.bsky.social & I are recruiting a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & mental health 💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling 📅 Apps are reviewed on a rolling basis 🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809