I want what he has

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Nice example of Simpson’s Paradox in this post. Minor league umpires have a higher accuracy rate on ball-strike calls than major league umpires but (a) they are worse on easy calls and (b) they are worse on hard calls. blogs.fangraphs.com/your-final-p...

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

"The set of properties ascribable to both you (denoted p) and a summers day (denoted s) is non-empty"

There’s this one postdoc open to “political science or allied disciplines“, implying the existence of “enemy disciplines“.

I hate that AI has made me approach cute animal videos with an air of suspicion. I resent having to harden my heart to the possibility of an unlikely friendship between a very large dog and a very small one

POSTDOC POSITION in social psychology at Cornell @cornellpsych.bsky.social! We will begin reviewing apps Dec 1st. Please repost! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31185 @spspnews.bsky.social @spspsc.bsky.social @aplssc.bsky.social @spssi.bsky.social @psychscience.bsky.social

How do we succeed at self-control? In a new paper in @pnas.org with James Wilson, David Kalkstein, and Melissa Ferguson, we use mouse-tracking of ~47,000 decisions of long-term over short-term to show that 'willpower' is too narrow a conception of self-control www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

Good news everyone: #Duke Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) are back!! We are now accepting applications for SSNAP 2026, which will take place from May 26 to June 6, 2026. #neuroscience #philosophy #brain Please spread the word! ssnap.submittable.com/submit

dissonance theorists reeling from successful multilab replication of dissonance effect

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Tired: moral dumbfounding Wired: *moral* dumbfounding

What's your preferred end of the universe scenario? Take your pick from this segment featuring the last book of our series on science and death -- this week on the @science.org podcast w/ Angela Saini & @astrokatie.com www.science.org/content/podc...

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time: It rules

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 share our preprint on false memories in naturalistic recollection! Distinct paths to false memory revealed in hundreds of narrative recalls paper: doi.org/10.31234/osf... w/ phoebehc.bsky.social (co-first) Vy A. Vo @davidpoeppel.bsky.social @toddgureckis.bsky.social thread below 👇

In between-Ss experiments: without a reference point, people say playing a prank is bad but give the same ‘bad’ rating to committing a war crime. Not in within-Ss experiments or when giving reference points for judgments. From @vladchituc.bsky.social www.crockettlab.org/s/1-s20-S001... #psych

perfect bluesky reply thank you

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

i'm joking—from this nice paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I spent like 5 minutes arguing with a philosopher this summer at SPP because I said it was crazy that you see perceptual nonlinearities in moral judgment since morality doesn’t have any physical correlate for a sensory receptor to transduce, and he said “yes it does.” Philosophers rule lmao

CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors. ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart. ISILDUR: true

UNC is hiring in Quantitative Psychology! Assistant Professor (tenure-track). Please share widely! Find details here: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

We're hiring!

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 is here! 🎉 This major update includes a foundational rewrite of S7 and user benefits such as smarter labeling and a revamped theming system. Check the details: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09... BONUS: Join the release party on Oct 3, 3pm ET. bit.ly/join-gg-extenders #RStats

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

"How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment" 📢New paper from: @vladchituc.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, & Brian Scholl www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Psychophysics meets moral psych! In the best possible way! I worry what this means for clinical research and patient reported outcomes, which often measure things like pain on a very simple 1-10 scale, often without clear anchoring. Such important work by @vladchituc.bsky.social!

Distributed range adaptation in human parietal encoding of numbers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.25.675916v1

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

If you read just one article about AI this weekend, let it be this. I've spent the last six years researching tech risk, existential risk, and AI. This is one of the best things I've read in that space. #AI #AIRisk #TechRisk #TechEthics #AIEthics #XRisk

Colin McGinn --

I hadn't read Turing's 1950 "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" (where he introduced the imitation game, a.k.a. the Turing test) since the advent of LLMs. It's so striking that people asked so many relevant questions about artificial intelligence right at the inception of the field.

This was such a fun project! Dozens of philosophers wrote philosophical arguments trying to get people to donate more to charity, and we ask: Do any of these work? Which ones work best? Why?

Genuinely powerful words to live by.

When there’s definitely not a bubble that’s definitely not getting perilously close to popping.

🎉 My R gen art package, artpack 0.2.0, is now on CRAN! You can read about the updates here -> buff.ly/s2vcm8g 2 years of dev work that made me realize I love development. To celebrate, I've hidden hex stickers around #positconf2025 - some are holographic ✨! Can't find one? Ask me for one!"

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org