The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20 📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣

Congratulations, Dr. Francisco Cruz (@cruzf.bsky.social), on on an incredibly clear and comprehensive PhD dissertation on "The psychology of lay beliefs about science" as well as an engaging and thoughtful defense. And thank you for inviting me to be on your jury; I learned so much from your work!

New resource on helping elementary-school-aged children navigate the internet. www.childrenandscreens.org/learn-explor...

New article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.

New paper! 🚨 Does studying psychology change how people think about psychology (even at an intuitive level)? 🤔 We tracked students across their degree and found shifts in their beliefs about the bases of psychological phenomena and their scientific explainability. 1/5

Submit your work to Origins of the Social Mind at #SPSP2026! Our morning timeslot is compatible with a variety of fantastic afternoon preconferences (e.g., Social Cognition, Gender). Deadline is 10/13! (Talks/posters can focus on any topic related to the origins of social cognition). See you there!

Nice piece by @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social where he implies that the only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those at SPP (@socphilpsych.bsky.social). I agree! A big shoutout to @levelsof.bsky.social & @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social for putting together a conversation-inspiring SPP 2025!

New article in Cognition! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Children are able to differentiate fake news from real news even before exposure to fake news on social media. This ability improves with age & even more so with cognitive reflection or the disposition to question an initial intuition.

Oooh, the Spanish translation of Learning to Imagine is pretty!

As an inveterate em-dash user, I loved this. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

I’m honored to be a keynote speaker at the 5th Jean Piaget Conference at the University of Geneva. A highlight of the conference waa a tour of the Jean Piaget archives, which includes 80,000 documents currently being organized and systemized. 10,000 of those documents are experimental protocols!

Watched a presentation today delivered in French but translated into English at the bottom of the PPT slides using AI. "Translated" is a generous description. I'm pretty sure the speaker did not say "I've got some bananas for you after I've exploded my talk."

A colleague asked if I've read Arisotle's Poetics recently. I'm flattered he thought I had read it at all.

Ithaca airport keeps playing a message about TSA prefaced with “due to the increased situation.” I hate it when situations increase.

The @socphilpsych.bsky.social presidential banquet begins with the (attempted) roast by John Doris of the (seemingly unroastable) @andrewshtulman.bsky.social #SPP2025

Day 3 of #SPP2025. Marina Bedny shares fascinating evidence that congenitally blind people use the same intuitive theories of color as sighted people to predict and explain object coloration even when they disagree about what color an object tends to be.

Day 2 of #SPP2025 begins with a fascinating talk by @chriskrupenye.bsky.social on whether chimpanzees and bonobos have a theory of mind. Krupenye’s studies show that our ape cousins track others’ knowledge not just to obtain food but also for a seemingly intrinsic love of drama!

Day 1 of #SPP2025 kicks off with a keynote by Fei Xu on the malleability of core knowledge systems.

#SPP2025 is here! So excited to kick things off with the preconference on Possibilities: Near and Far and a talk by Laurie Paul.

US News & World Report sent me a survey to rate the quality of undergrad Psychology programs for their 2026 rankings. It includes over 600 programs! How would anyone's ratings be meaningful? I don't think I'll participate in this popularity contest.

A reviewer on a paper I’m also reviewing recommended the authors cite some of my work. They followed up this suggestion with ”Please know: I am not Andrew Shtulman!” Hmm. Sounds like the sort of thing the real Andrew Shtulman would say.

Delighted to attend the first annual Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science, or SoCal MINDS! Also delighted to hear Wani Qiu present new data showing that teaching by principle facilitates children’s problem solving more than teaching by example.

Thank you, Skeptic (and Anondah Saide!), for your thoughtful review of Learning to Imagine. I really like the accompanying images. www.skeptic.com/article/lear...

Happy birthday, Tamar. I’m so glad we can celebrate you at SRCD!

Check out our symposium on *parents' lay theories of cognitive development* at #SRCD2025! Ft. work by @reutshachnai.bsky.social, @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social, @dominicgibson.bsky.social, and yours truly, discussed by @andrewshtulman.bsky.social !

Come to the SPP Preconference on Possibilities: Near and Far! Speakers: Sara Aronowitz Seth Goldwasser Melissa Kibbe Tamar Kushnir Brian Leahy Shaun Nichols Laurie Paul Jonathan Phillips Alison Springle

Only at an academic conference

Of all the ways students misspell my name, Dr. Shitlman is my favorite.

Mind over Matter: Consistency Monitoring and Domain-Specific Learning 📣 From Igor Bascandziev, Adani Abutto, Caren Walker & Elizabeth Bonawitz

It's my honor to announce the 2025 winner of the Stanton Prize given out by the Society of Philosophy and Psychology (drum roll 🥁): Shannon Spaulding 🏆 Huge congratulations!! Make sure to see Shannon's prize lecture at the SPP conference at Cornell this June. www.socphilpsych.org/meetings.html

Got a review request where the option for declining was "If you do not have even 10 minutes of time to provide any feedback, please click this link." A little passive aggressive, no?

Thank you, Big [If True], for devoting an episode of your show to children's susceptibility to online misinformation. And thank you for inviting me to weigh in! www.tvo.org/video/kids-c...

@ubcpsych.bsky.social is such a lovely department in such a lovely setting. Thank you Darko Odic, Andy Baron, Ara Norenzayan, @jkileyhamlin.bsky.social, @jiayingzhao.bsky.social, etc. for inviting me to share my research on the development of cognitive reflection!

SPP abstracts due this Friday!!!

New Year’s resolutions: 1. Finish the papers I’m working on. 2. Find the six-fingered man who killed my father and challenge him to a duel. 3. Exercise more.

My family has taken my love of improbable foods to new heights with this gift of Doritos spirits. It tastes like nacho-flavored vodka. Delicious.

The Occidental College Psychology Department knows how to have fun.

An excerpt of Learning to Imagine (www.amazon.com/Learning-Ima...) in the Wall Street Journal. I love the accompanying graphic! www.wsj.com/science/why-...

Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities (www.amazon.com/Learning-Ima...) is coming out Nov. 14!   To celebrate, I will be posting an image and caption from each chapter over the next several days. Here’s the table of contents to start things off.

"Shtulman ably and incisively navigates this vast, fascinating terrain." Thank you, Science, for your thoughtful review of LEARNING TO IMAGINE (preorderable here: www.amazon.com/Learning-Ima...). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...