This years Christmas Mantel in celebration of Mary Poppins, Thalo's (and my) favorite mysterious superhero. Note genuine, and only slightly cracked Royal Doulton Bowl. Happy New Year to everybody

A 2025 highlight ⚡ In February, CASBS's project on The Social Science of Caregiving, led by @alisongopnik.bsky.social, guest-edited the Winter 2025 issue of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Learn about the project & read the entire open access issue: bit.ly/3Qm49ha

Excellent piece from Kelsey Piper at The Argument. How getting richer made teenagers less free . I really like The Argument, in general, worth checking out. open.substack.com/pub/theargum...

I think of AI and LLMs as a new kind of archival access in the sense of @himself.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.socials take of AI as cultural technology www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nice thread describing our new study on why kids play

New paper with Junyi Chu, Tomer Ullman et al showing that kids think more difficulty is more fun! Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

New preprint in advance of a Phil Trans paper. Outlining a theoretical argument bridging Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning. And empirical data that kids do too! arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

There’s a fantastic developmental science resource called Children Helping Science, at MIT (childrenhelpingscience.com). Researchers run child studies online, Parents sign up & participate with their kids. CHS got an offer from an anonymous donor: matching gifts up to $100K through December!

The decision by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downgrade its recommendations to protect infants from hepatitis B is a dangerous move that will harm children. Click here to read AAP's full statement: bit.ly/3Y9ZQJT

In a keynote at NeurIPS 2025, Melanie Mitchell argues that developmental and comparative psychologists have a lot to teach AI researchers about studying cognitive capabilities. https://spectrum.ieee.org/melanie-mitchell?share_id=9075652

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Annual Thanksgiving blog post! This year we are giving thanks for "information." www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2025/11...

If you’d like to independently investigate this for yourself, here’s one simple way: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Reflecting on last year's gala as we get ready for our 111th on 12/9. We hope to see you as we honor Claudia Goldin, Alison Gopnik, and Christopher Eisgruber of @princeton.edu.

An excellent and very clear piece on LLM's and thinking. See also Farrell et al. in Science, our piece making the point about LLM's as a form of communication rather than cognition. alisongopnik.com/Papers_Aliso...

For our next episode, "Can #AI Help Us Understand #Babies?" we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to ask UC Berkeley cognitive scientist @alisongopnik.bsky.social how babies learn—and why grownups should be jealous: youtu.be/taZeJc7frK0 #PhilSky #philosophy #language

Day Three of the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium kicked off with Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social talking about Evaluating Cognitive Capacities in AI Systems, with commentary by Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbe...

Join this free workshop on Nov 12 with Steven T. Piantadosi of Science Homecoming and learn the how-to's and beneficial impacts of communicating the importance of scientific research to your local community through opinion pieces. Register today. Link in comments.

The National Institute of Social Sciences is delighted to announce Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher of mind at UC Berkeley, as one of the 2025 Honorees for its Gold Honor Medal for distinguished service to society and humanity.

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” 🧵

This was a really great event , amazingly good communication given the great range of disciplines, and a tribute to Sean and Jennan.

An excellent new poscast on our care project - why caregiving is so important to human nature and so neglected in social science. www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Uz...

This seminar by @alisongopnik.bsky.social was really good. It's ostensibly about AI, but ventures into some fascinating topics about childhood development and caregiving, and what I really loved was how Alison tied all that together. If this is where AI research goes, it makes me much more hopeful.

What if care was never a soft skill, but the deepest form of intelligence? Dr. Alison Gopnik makes the case that caregiving is core to what makes us human - biologically, emotionally, politically. This episode explores care as connection, courage & a quiet kind of wisdom. Listen: pod.link/1519411454

Will be fun to see who is as smart as a 4 year old

This should be a fascinating and exciting workshop

Reserve your free tickets to SFI’s next Community Lecture with renowned developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik: “Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an AI as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?” October 21, 7:30 pm at The Lensic Performing Arts Center. Tickets: lensic.org/events/aliso...

This is the way www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

"It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

This is one of my favorite interviews, especially about how two-year-old Thalo revealed to me the total awesomeness of garbage trucks · See why here: templeton.org/news/what-ch...

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com Trump’s proposed “compact” with nine major universities “is extortion, plain and simple,” Erwin Chemerinsky writes in a guest essay. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education in America requires that every university reject it.”

I suggested that play is an example where the metric maximized by adults in the ARC games (task completion) is precisely the metric minimized by children during play: the ideal imaginative play is never completed. "Success" is failure. Learning "efficiency" in this setting is irrelevant.

A good piece in the NYT that pairs well with my own recent post on "magical thinking" about AI. NYT (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/o... My post: aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-th...

OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...

vindicating I think for @himself.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, et al, particularly the drift toward GPT-as-reference-librarian usage

Understanding AI as a social technology www.programmablemutter.com/p/understand...

Mark your calendars and tell your friends: No Kings 2.0 on October 18. The sequel will be (and HAS to be) even bigger.

Nice video of Laura Lewis et al.s paper on social curiosity in chimps and children, from our lab. Paper is here.https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2024.2242 www.nbcbayarea.com/video/news/n...

Alvy is one of the good ones - I can't wait to listen to this conversation.

www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-lang... Gopnikism, interactionism, structuralism and role play.

Please sign! Science funding got strong support from the Senate but is now in the House! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This is one of the best things I've listened to in a long time. Heroic team effort by Elizabeth Mynatt and @seanmcarroll.bsky.social to explain (with lots of examples) what the US is in the process of losing by gutting research. youtu.be/tm_EtHbqtQY?...

In July, we unpacked why we expect parents to do it all alone with leaders @elissastrauss.bsky.social @alisongopnik.bsky.social Alicia Lieberman & Karima Grant. Full recording ▶️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPph... Subscribe to join future conversations ✍️ earlychildhoodmatters.online#subscribe

My newly updated and refreshed web-page, with our latest AI papers, all my WSJ columns, many new podcasts and much more. (My birthday present from Alvy Ray Smith, pretty cool to have the Pixar cofounder as your web designer). www.alisongopnik.com

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton address critics who think they fuel AI hype on the Hard Fork Podcast. Some interesting exchanges, including with @alisongopnik.bsky.social about whether AI is a "cultural technology." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/p... @kevinroose.com @caseynewton.bsky.social

Children are often cast as passive vessels into which we pour culture. But children create cultures of their own—vibrant ones with special properties. Just one of the topics discussed in our recent episode with @dorsaamir.bsky.social & @sheinalew.bsky.social! Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

I'll be speaking at the first ever groundbreaking symposium on the cognitive science of caregiving , with terrific fellow speakers, at the Cognitive Science Society Meeting July 31

This should really be great!

A fascinating podcast with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir about childhood across cultures, very insightful ideas about how contemporary Western parents could learn from forager childhoods, especially the importance of peer culture (read the Opies!). podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...