you can tell so much about people by whom they give the benefit of the doubt to

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help? New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis. osf.io/preprints/ps...

"Condoleeza Rice discusses restoring confidence in American democracy" stanforddaily.com/2025/11/12/r...

There's still time to register for the 2025 Big Team Science Conference (October 6-8, live on Zoom)! All fees are OPTIONAL, so you can pay what you'd like (or nothing at all!) to gain access to a ton of amazing BTS content. bigteamscienceconference.github.io/registration/

Our full 2025 program and schedule are now up on our website! We've got so many great presentations lined up, you won't want to miss it! bigteamscienceconference.github.io/program/

timeline coincidence of the most depressing order cc @darthbluesky.bsky.social @louisathelast.bsky.social

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Capybaras lounging in yuzu-filled hot springs is my happy place

It's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!

Just got an “out of office” reply with the most amazing example of “there’s a German word for that.” Abwesenheitsbenachrichtigung!

Possible to start to tell a unified story: "Trump is personally too old, crazy, and confused to run things, so at any given time the question is which co-president is in charge. At first it was Musk, & we got the crazy chaotic DOGE era. Then Navarro: a trade war that crashed markets. Now Miller..."

It’s completely insane that US troops are illegally deployed to suppress domestic opposition and it’s not uniformly condemned by the press and political elite.

Huge congratulations to Drs Anjie Cao and Rondeline Williams on their successful defenses this week!! @anjiecao.bsky.social

Please assign these articles for your teaching as well as your own browsing, and let us know 1) how you're using them and 2) what articles you need to help you in your teaching!

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

“We want scientists who hold identities that may be under attack to know that we are proud to be your colleagues, and that our science is stronger as a result of your being in this field.” 👏

my endorsement for any democratic presidential candidate who promises to send the entire DOGE team to prison

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond. I hope you’ll read and share the piece. stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

Thanks to Evan Kidd, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social (Eds) for organizing the awesome *Open* Encyc. of Cog. Sci. and entrusting me with/ the honor of penning the entry on "Language" (in < 3500 words, so do see other entries for much, MUCH more!) oecs.mit.edu/pub/ho9e9c80...

“From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.”

Our client Rümeysa Öztürk has not been charged with any crime. She is being held in ICE detention in retaliation for her political beliefs. Writing an op-ed is not a deportable offense.

It works. The government here largely works. Because we are so spoiled by how well it works, we are letting a fool convince us it is broken.

Super excited to submit a big sabbatical project this year: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood": osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨4-5 new postdoc positions in language & cognition🚨 😇 One postdoc will work specifically with Eon-Suk Ko and I on the ManyBabies-AtHome project, focusing on infant word recognition in global, remote settings using collaborative, open science practices [https://shorturl.at/5l3tW]. @manybabies.org

In which I, a person who trained over 1,500 early career scientists all over the world in how to use Twitter, tell the scientific community that Twitter sucks now and you should use Bluesky for networking and outreach instead.

Psych-DS is (1) spellcheck for your datasets and (2) a pathway to standardizing data in our academic fields that *everyone* can learn. And it's live RIGHT NOW! psych-ds.github.io (This is the announcement post I've been leading up to)

An incredible leader who is meeting the moment. Send this to everyone you know in higher education administration.

It’s so weird how we’re all just working like this is still a normal country.

If you are a faculty member at a US university, please consider signing this excellent petition asking our presidents, chancellors, etc to work together to defend our institutions from the direct attacks by Trump administration: sites.google.com/view/we-must...

This segment from @maryannefranks.bsky.social is an incredibly tight argument that captures the breadth of the Trump assault on free speech perfectly and in less than a minute. Spread it far and wide.

"The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy."

Republicans control every part of the federal government. They’re unpopular people who have been doing unpopular things — if you can’t make the obvious case that any shutdown is yet another misstep of their own making, you should get the hell out of politics

Republicans’ partisan spending bill turns the federal government into a slush fund for Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It’s unthinkable that any Senate Democrat would hand them a blank check by voting for cloture.

I’m not sure that the Trump Democrats strategy of letting the bully take their lunch money today in the hopes the bully will be nice to them tomorrow will be all that effective

Holy cow. This is VERY well done. This is what Team Fight looks like.

The platform I run, Children Helping Science, is supported almost entirely by US government science funding, both directly and in collaboration with CHS researchers. Here's the note we sent to users today - we need help gathering your stories and citations! Submit here: forms.gle/zFnzrVURntdZ...

I'm going to keep repeating this until they haul me away but -- Trump's 2024 win was not an historic landslide but a fairly modest win (Carter won by a bigger margin in 1976) -- Even if he *had* won a landslide, he repeatedly denounced Project 2025 & pretended he wasn't going to do any of this

yep. and this is the basic problem with trump being psychologically incapable of perceiving a positive sum relationship. everything is a dominance game for him.

HEY EVERYONE REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP WAS IMPEACHED FOR DENYING AID TO UKRAINE BECAUSE HE WANTED ZELENSKY TO LIE AND SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT BIDEN AND ZELENKSY WOULDN’T DO IT? Maybe literally one fucking American newspapers could mention this in their, “think pieces,” about what happened yesterday.

this was always the agenda and some of us said so and were called hysterical bsky.app/profile/jame...

I have work to do but I'm distracted by watching US scientific progress & leadership being irreversibly undermined because a few unelected malcontents are penalizing researchers for following legal requirements set out by congressional orders to augment basic research with benefits to society.

"Indirect costs" just means paying the full cost of the research. That's it. Some costs are for one project, like lab equipment. Some are shared by many, like buildings and utilities. Grants that don't pay shared costs are a net negative. The fact that Harvard used to turn them down drives that home

Hey if anyone is considering backing up any datasets for some reason today, the Open Science Framework has free storage up to 5G/private repository, and up to 50G/public repository. (The OSF is run by a 501c3 (Center for Open Science), so if you do this you might also consider making a donation.)

Happy New Year from the Izu Shaboten Zoo!