Looking forward to presenting this work soon at #Hbes2026

Next week, I will be presenting this work and some extensions at #HBES2026 in Rabat, Morocco. Happy to connect!

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New preprint: "Social-information seeking in development: The child as experimental psychologist" (w/ Azzurra Ruggeri). osf.io/preprints/ps... We review literature on how children use their information-seeking and hypothesis-testing skills to learn about other agents, & ask whether...

I'm on an episode of my favorite podcast!

Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Why is domain-generality so intuitive? This paper makes a case for why we need an evolutionary psychology of psychology, and what it has to say about the study of intelligence, consciousness, domain-generality, and the theory crisis. @pdurkee.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our new paper on causal judgment is now out! Led by Can Konuk, with Salvador Mascarenhas. We study how causes that feature several variables (`A and B caused E') are represented in the human mind. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

A Bayesian model best explains these inferences. Participants’ judgments are best captured by a model that rationally integrates new evidence with prior expectations about others’ competence.

Our new paper (brilliantly led by Marius Mercier) finds that people make near-optimal inferences when evaluating someone's competence based on sparse data:

Congratulations to Ian Thornton and colleagues who published their Mainz-Linez illusion in i-Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social): the red dots appears to wave left and right when one looks at one of the black dots, but they actually move straight journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

One version of this argument is that you shouldn't necessarily pursue problems with obvious real-world implications. People might be working on problems that are not really tractable just because it would be nice if they could be solved.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

in my decision making class I run a version of The Endowment Effect that goes like this: When students come in, sealed envelopes are waiting on their chair-arms. The main slide that greets them says 'NO TOUCHING'

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/106... We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

Peer review meltdown in one diagram. Greater emphasis on glamour journals leads people to try their luck with mediocre papers. This drains the review pool (they often have to be re-reviewed elsewhere). That drops the accuracy of peer review, creating more incentive to submit mediocre papers…

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

Thanks @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on "Using the information bottleneck to study social cognition". Max develops resource-rational models that elegantly unify existing theories for various phenomena such as stereotyping and ToM development. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

My student Madeleine Horner interviewed @ahbailey.bsky.social about her fascinating research on gender and the prototype of the person concept: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYDg...

The Selfish Gene (TSG) was published 50 yrs ago. I was recently asked about Dawkins' concep of the selfish gene in light of my review many years ago of Burt & Trivers' book on selfish genetic elements: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Here is my response (lightly edited): 🧪 #BioAnth 1/14

Really interesting study on the effect of ingroup / outgroup dynamics on causal judgment:

Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

Our paper on the human brain networks sensitive to geometric shape is now final in @elife.bsky.social, with nice videos by Mathias Sablé-Meyer explaining each figure! A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain elifesciences.org/articles/106...

New sci-hub just dropped.

Great paper giving a rational explanation for the gambler's "fallacy".

I'm excited to share that my first paper "Guessing and its Limits" is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research! Thread below. TLDR: I present a novel puzzle for a recent "question-sensitive" theory of guessing/belief in multi-question scenarios. philpapers.org/rec/FANGAI-2

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

postdoc opportunity! would be a good fit for an intergroup person with NLP chops interested in the role of historical narratives bonus, Edinburgh is a phenomenal city to live in with wonderful, walkable quality of life elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

A top journal in logic flips to Diamond Open Access, 'following successful launches of Diamond OA journals in nearby fields, such as Glossa and Open Mind.' dailynous.com/2025/12/10/e...

This week, we talk to @hugoreasoning.bsky.social about all things "epistemic". Are we gullible and prone to misinformation? Are we vigilant in favor of our interests? Enjoy the wide-ranging conversation! www.podbean.com/eas/pb-wphps... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... youtu.be/nf42LNg6y-A

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

🧠 New paper alert! Can people infer others’ values not from what they choose, but simply from what comes to mind? Across four studies, we show they can—drawing on an intuitive theory of how options are generated. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238 👇

I’m recruiting #PhD students to join my Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social! We study how infants learn about the natural world from others 🌱 If you’re interested in #devpsych, #EvPsych, and #infantstudies, please reach out and apply! More info below (1/2)

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers: @openmindjournal.bsky.social The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social. Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative. A 2 min demo (and a short thread): 1/7

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore? Well, I wrote about it. 🧵

A new study by Zach Horne et al. combines history of science and psychology experiments to document the appeal of 'intrinsic' explanations: scientists and laypeople are drawn to explanations that appeal to an object's inherent properties. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes? I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)

Fantastic opportunity to join the cogsci community at Edinburgh:

Imagine if all the money academics pour into OA fees at for-profit publishing corporations went instead to academic societies, which exist to support science; or to university presses, which exist to support academia

Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…

Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints: 🧵

Recent studies suggest that manipulating "growth mindset" might not improve students' academic performance This new research suggests that it has a different effect. Growth mindset makes people more inclined to *blame* students for their failures escholarship.org/content/qt4k...

Really loving this kind of engagement between the psychology and philosophy of causation. So much better than psychologists re-explaining how people are just oh so irrational and philosophers examining their intuitions about increasingly elaborate tales of rock throwing and firing squads 😉

New short paper with @kevingoneill.github.io and Paul Henne: We re-analyse data from a recent study on causal judgment, and find that a counterfactual model explains why temporal order influences people's intuitions. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...