Larisa Heiphetz Solomon

@drlarisa.bsky.social

Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia studying how kids and adults think about morality, religion, and law. Lover of balloons. Lab website: columbiasamclab.weebly.com

Reason-giving isn't a Western invention. New in Child Development: 360 children aged 5–9 in China, Kenya & the US spontaneously gave each other reasons to settle disagreements — and did so more when they disagreed than when they agreed. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Children across diverse societies exchange reasons to resolve disagreements

Abstract. The exchange of reasons in rational discourse is crucial for resolving disagreements. In a preregistered cross-cultural study, 360 5- to 9-year-o

academic.oup.com

This paper shows that immigration enforcement can _increase_ crime. Undocumented immigrants already have the lowest crime rate, but tough-on-immigration policy makes immigrants less likely to report crime. So immigration enforcement worsens the problem it was ostensibly meant to solve

Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from
Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrantst
By FELIPE GONÇALVES, ELISA JÁCOME, AND EMILY WEISBURST*
We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety.
We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communities. We find that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to police and increased offending against Hispanics. The number of reported crimes is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We show that reduced reporting drives the offending increase and provide the first elasticity of offending to victim reporting in the liter-ature, calculating that a 10 percent decline in reporting increases offending by 7.9 percent. (JEL J15, K37, K42)

I got a mysterious e-mail from CogSci saying that they are aware of an "ongoing issue with proceedings content" and are working with UC Merced to fix it. I'm not at the conference and have no idea what this is about - can any of you fill me in?

My lab is hosting 2 amazing Barnard undergrads this summer who just presented posters of their work! Kate McElvaney is asking how kids & adults from different religions think about redemption; Ari Estrin is studying evaluations of religious & secular transgressors. So lucky to work w both of them!

I have once again misspelled my own name in the author list of a paper only for it to be caught by the lovely person copy-editing the article. Also, fun fact: every time I spell Heiphetz correctly, I am spelling it out in my head letter by letter.

Belief in magic emerges most strongly among those who are both scientifically oriented and residually religious. Secular rationalism does not erase belief in supernatural mechanisms. It affirms the individual’s agency to decide what they are academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

The magic of secularization

Abstract. Institutional secularization does not necessitate a secular public. In fact, as church memberships decline, more individualized sources of supern

academic.oup.com

New paper out today in Social and Personality Psychology Compass! What happens when our moral values come into conflict? Our new paper explores "metamorality": the second-order principles we use to navigate conflicting moral choices. W/ Jesse Graham

Bild

Many things. The most often is probably post-decision rationalization* - makes it easy to just pick stuff, no agonizing involved *for non-psych followers: once people make a decision they convince themselves that was the best decision & end up happy with whatever they chose

Neuroskeptic@neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 4w ago

Here's a question for academic psychologists - have you ever applied something you read in a psychology journal in your everyday life?

Thank you so much to Philip Gorski for visiting with my lab today! Lots of food for thought from his presentation on a recent shift from rhetoric around White Christian nationalism to frameworks around "civilization," and the moral implications of these narratives.

New Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Curiosity shapes brain-like architectures and functions

How does complex cognition emerge from simpler underlying processes? We show that two components are sufficient: infant-like curiosity and brain-like biophysical constraints jointly drive the emergenc...

biorxiv.org

All formatted, all reference-d. It turns out references count toward the word limit and people like to give their articles long titles sometimes! But it is all done and submitted and it is time for me to take a nap.

Larisa Heiphetz Solomon@drlarisa.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I think I may have just ... finished a draft ... of a book? Still need to format and make the references and such. But I think ... all the words ... might be there? What even is this.

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

Screenshot of article title page, "Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules"

Beloved The New Jim Crow I have many other history/sociology books in mind but I think the 3rd should offer some hope (and could be a novel or other literary work) and nothing like that is readily occurring to me. If any of you have a candidate in mind I'd love to hear!

Post nicht verfügbar.

What a special treat to give this keynote at IACESR! Thank you so much for inviting me, for the amazing intellectual engagement, and for the chance to visit Brno for the first time.

IACESR Society@iacesr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Day 3 was kicked off with an excellent keynote by @drlarisa.bsky.social on God Concepts Across Development. The talk explored how our concepts of God change from childhood to adulthood and how these concepts, in turn, shape our own thinking and behaviour.