🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

🚨New preprint!🚨 My first first-author project with Cameron Rouse Turner Natalia Vélez (natvelali.bsky.social @ 🦋) Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab How do people evaluate idle collaborators who don’t help out during group tasks? TL;DR: Sometimes it’s okay not to help with the dishes 🧵👇 Link: tinyurl.com/32wfwkxp

Why are legal documents so impenetrable? Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese conveys a sense of authority, cognitive scientists have found. mitsha.re/Cpqt50T224n

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. The convoluted “legalese” used in legal documents conveys a special sense of authority, and even non-lawyers have learned to wield it. news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study…

This applies to many more industries than law

New study: nonlawyer lawmakers "wrote in a more convoluted manner" perhaps to sound more "authoritative". So we maybe we can simplify laws without sacrificing content. PNASNews article by UChicago Law School's Eric Martínez, and profs at University of Melbourne & Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…

Now out in Cognition! ➰"Ambivalence by Design: A Computational Account of Loopholes"➰ by Qian, Bridgers, Parece, Maya Taliaferro, and me bit.ly/cognitionLooph…

Our philosophy-informed LLM papers now out in TACL! See the improved paper or thread linked below for more on “bibliotechnism”, the referential ability of ngram models, what it means to say LLMs (or humans) have beliefs, beachgoing bardolaters, and more. direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/d…

Very humbled to be in such amazing company on this list... Congrats to everyone recognized! So, so grateful for the support from my mentors and collaborators.

Excited to have been named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 under 35! I am happy that, these days, language & human cognition are topics that the world cares deeply about (thanks to recent developments in AI). Not only are these topics impactful, they are also fun to study!

Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT and I are so pleased about this: mitpress.mit.edu/cognitive-scie… Thanks to Harvard Library MIT Libraries The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social for making this happen!

Many AI governance stakeholders agree that certain laws or regulations should apply only to “frontier models.” But what is a “frontier model”? LawAI’s latest working paper discusses some of the most important legal considerations for efforts to define that term:

[Please retweet!] My paper, 'Cognitive Representations of Social Relationships and their Developmental Origins" has been accepted at Behavioral and Brain Sciences! I'm thrilled to be able to engage with people's commentary! Please consider writing one! osf.io/preprints/psya…

Out now in Cognitive Science: We investigate how people think judges should handle immoral laws. Should judges follow the law no matter what, or can exceptions be made for (grossly) immoral laws? We surveyed 167 laypeople and 141 participants with legal training to find out.

Congrats to the 4 MIT students who have been named 2025 Rhodes Scholars - esp David Oluigbo in Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦 lab, who plans to apply AI to complex medical problems and systemic healthcare challenges. 🙌 mcgovern.mit.edu/2024/11/16/fou…

David did a “scientist interview” with me his freshman year, and I immediately recruited him to help with our law in the brain project. So happy to see him advancing in his academic career! ✨

New paper with Alexander Fung, Pramod RT/ಪ್ರಮೋದ್ ರಾ ತಾ , Jessica Chomik , Nancy Kanwisher @[email protected], Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦 on the representations that underlie our intuitive physical reasoning about the world. Thread 🧵about our new preprint 📄✨linked here: tinyurl.com/intphyslang 1/10

Think about this study a lot

So true

MIT researchers found that legal language is intentionally complex, not for clarity, but to create a false sense of authority. Even lawyers prefer plain English. mitsha.re/iMCm50ValLB

Now out in PNAS! Link to the paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… News story by MIT News: news.mit.edu/2025/esperanto…