People are less kind than they used to be—a pervasive notion that we‘ve all encountered and maybe even entertained. Check out this thought-provoking research on how it might arise despite being wrong!

i have been mulling whether/how to say something this since the press releases started coming out 4 days ago, but feel i need to say something now. i am deeply disappointed in how the media has covered recent findings in consciousness science. 🧵👇

Excited to be at #POLMETH40 today sharing results from a lab-in-the-field study 👇 tl;dr: Omnibus studies can have lots of "interference" between modules, and analyzing it can be cool/generative. Thanks to Busara Center and MIT GOV/LAB for support on this project.

Promising step towards parsimony in computational models of behavior—so cool!

We're coming up on graduate school application season and our department is committed to helping folks--esp URM researchers-- navigate this process! If you're applying to PhD or research assistant jobs this fall please consider PPREP! Short app due 9/22: bit.ly/3L2WZMW

New publication in PNASNews on the social transmission of empathy! Humans learn and unlearn #empathy when observing empathic reactions of others, based on #observational prediction errors. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

New 📄: Two people w/ identical priors can draw opposite conclusions from the same data simply because they want to. Though seemingly at odds w/ Bayesian theories of the mind, such wishful thinking may actually emerge from fully Bayesian computations. nature.com/articles/s4156…

1/5 🧠 Our new 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝐶𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 article challenges characterizing people as irrational. We argue behavioral science aimed at policy should start by assuming people are reasonable. PDF: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Excited to share my first preprint with Amitai Shenhav Shenhav Lab “Fewer Voters Opt Out of Decisions to Reject the Worst Candidate” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 🧵🧵🧵

We have two open postdoc positions in the lab! Check out the links below for details. Postdoc in neuroscience of reward learning: jobs.uzh.ch/offene-stellen… Postdoc in physiology of learning and decision making: jobs.uzh.ch/offene-stellen… Please retweet!

💥 Our paper on social learning of prejudice (with Björn Lindström, Mina Cikara, and David Amodio) is now OUT in Science Advances!!! 🥳science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Have a look at the 🧵🔽 for an explainer, but also check out the full paper for brand new data & more context

Love this piece! When trying to explain what we (aim to) do, all that matters is subjective value. That is, how relevant states make us feel. In agreement with this, I like to think of our imperfect affective measures as windows into subjective value. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Ryan Carlson (@carlsonrw) is interested in motivation, introspection, and morality. His job market paper is “Quantifying Accuracy and Bias in Motive Introspection.”. 📝 drive.google.com/open?id=1NASMb… 🌐 carlsonr.com

Many of us measure altruism and selfishness in dollars and cents. If you want to know how selfless someone is—the logic goes—add up how much money they give to strangers or charity. New work w/ M.J. Crockett complicates this picture: osf.io/preprints/psya… 🧵

I’m recruiting PhD students to join the Computational Minds and Machines Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle! Join us to work at the intersection of computational cognitive science and AI with a broad focus on social intelligence. (Please reshare!)