Erin Westgate
@erinwestgate.bsky.social
Social psychologist, studying boredom, interest, and thinking (...and why it's so hard for so many of us!). Assistant Professor @ University of Florida 🐊 🌐 erinwestgate.com 📸 https://instagram.com/erin.corwin.westgate
The Coupled Minds Lab is recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027. Our lab studies how conversations shape the way people connect, change their minds, and learn, using fMRI hyperscanning, NLP, and computational modeling. The deadline is December 1, 2026. More info here: coupled-minds.github.io
Coupled Minds Lab
Coupled Minds Lab — social neuroscience of conversation, negotiation, and human–AI interaction.
coupled-minds.github.io
1/7 Anesthesia across phylogeny From nematodes to humans, anesthesia induces remarkably similar changes in neural activity. And this could provide important clues about the neural foundations of consciousness. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Had my inauguration on Monday and was overwhelmed to see so many wonderful people there. Thank you to everybody who made it; for all your wonderful wishes; for donating to Doctors without Borders; and also for ignoring my wishes and preparing wonderful gifts. <3 Will publish blog post/speech soon.
that is a very good purple
Brendan Barrett@bjjbarrett.bsky.social · 5d agoOur paper on how orangutan mothers plan and alter their space use at personal costs so their offspring may play with similarly aged offspring (independent of kinship and fruit productivity) has transitioned from preprint to peer reviewed publication doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Social play is key for development in many animals, yet how solitary species with single young acquire playmates has remained a quandary. We unlock this using long-term data from 31 Bornean orangutan mother-offspring pairs in our new publication in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2621225123. 🧵
Does hating yourself for being gay make your sex life unfulfilling? Does an unfulfilling sex life feed back into your negative views about your sexuality? We answer this question and more in this preprint (co-lead with one of our lab's grad students, Sarah Kowall): osf.io/preprints/ps...
Does internalized homonegativity lower sexual satisfaction? A longitudinal assessment among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM) in Canada's three largest cities
Purpose: Internalized homonegativity is associated with lower sexual satisfaction among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM). Though internalized homonegativity is commonly seen as ...
osf.io
🚨 TT Job Alert 🚨 Florida is hiring a new TT asst prof in developmental psychology! Area/age open, early/middle childhood preferred. Come for the gators, stay for the awesome colleagues 🐊 Apply here (deadline 10/15): explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/54...
And if you don’t want to do BORING research with Erin, you can apply to join the most psychologically rich team at UF: the Social Science Collaboratory. Pumpkin carving skills still a bonus. We win together, we lose together. And I desperately need a win. 🎃
Erin Westgate@erinwestgate.bsky.social · 6d agoI'm recruiting a grad student at Florida this fall! If you find boredom interesting, and psychological richness weirdly compelling, consider applying! Pumpkin carving & rock painting skills a bonus. Applications due 12/1, see website for details: www.erinwestgate.com/join-the-lab...
I'm recruiting a grad student at Florida this fall! If you find boredom interesting, and psychological richness weirdly compelling, consider applying! Pumpkin carving & rock painting skills a bonus. Applications due 12/1, see website for details: www.erinwestgate.com/join-the-lab...
I’m recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at UCSB! I'm looking for someone who's interested in how children make sense of others' actions, minds, and relationships, and/or how children come to feel socially connected to others. Learn more here: folk.psych.ucsb.edu/team/join-th... Please share!
Optimism isn't just for humans: Bonobos tend to behave optimistically after hearing laughter #socsciresearch #socialpsych New work by Erica Cartmill and colleagues. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New milestone: over $1,000,000 of [unfunded] grant proposals in a single semester. And it's just October. We're just getting started. Big things [not] happening around here. Better keep your eyes peeled [closed] 💅
During fiesta, every day is for balloons w/ @davidleyphd.bsky.social @drcolintmahoney.bsky.social @katiew.bsky.social @lcornelas.bsky.social @kristicarrasquillo.bsky.social @lesliebrickphd.bsky.social
🆕 New preprint: Is “person = man” inevitable? In the matrilineal Mosuo, men and women imagined someone like themselves. In mainstream China, younger participants did too—but girls and women increasingly favored men with age. [https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ejd76_v1] #NewPreprint
Sundays are for springs! 🫧 On a mission to see the Bats at Ginnie this morning 😎
Get yourself colleagues who go out scalloping with you on gorgeous days in September 🩵
Scalloping in Crystal River, Florida
YouTube video by Erin Westgate
youtu.be
📊 New resource: ISAAC, an open corpus for studying social group attitudes 💬 527M+ Reddit posts (2007–2023) 🧠 Covers race, sexuality, age, ability, and skin tone 🗺️ Validated against Gallup and Google Trends 🔍 No-code or Python/SQL: isaac.psychology.illinois.edu 📖 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.27059
We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...
Had a fabulous time in Montreal at #SESP2026. Thank you all those who came to our symposium session on "The Social Nature of Morality: How People Infer Harm, Minds, and Trust." Many thanks to Cristina for organizing it!
I don’t think everyone realizes how bad things are for US science: For the fiscal year that just ended, the Trump regime withheld $1.4 billion from the National Science Foundation’s research budget, which is about 1/5 of its primary research budget.
National Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress (Gift Article)
The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants.
nytimes.com
Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."
Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴@wamsleylab.bsky.social · last wk.The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)
89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.
Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴@wamsleylab.bsky.social · last wk.The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
During fiesta, every day is for Balloons @katiew.bsky.social @davidleyphd.bsky.social @lcornelas.bsky.social
“I was flabbergasted that someone could take the time to generate a paper that I believe is fake,” Rastle told us.
When open data are misused
Credit: HALUSTD from Popspixel via Canva When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset …
retractionwatch.com
This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever
The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...
If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent
