I'm delighted that our paper, "Risk Matters Less When Options Are Apples-to-Oranges: The Translate-and-Accommodate Model" (Evan Weingarten, Yuval Rottenstreich, and George Wu) has just been accepted at Psychological Review.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
1/N
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
Not all authors are equal: Moral judgments of plagiarism from AI and human sources
‼️Recent work from Calahndra Brake, Kang Lee & Ori Friedman
When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
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
New working paper I’ve got out (w/ Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social )
Still a work in progress, but we’re excited about the idea and are currently working to extend it. Thanks, Gary, for sharing it!
Super cool! Congrats on the paper!
Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper (forthcoming in Cognition): Context-dependent effects of branches in decisions under risk authors.elsevier.com/a/1mXL%7E2Hx...
Key finding: when people choose between risky options, they’re more likely to pick the one with more distinct probabilistic outcomes (“more pathways to winning”).
Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: Dietvorst, B. J. (in press). Understanding people's preferences for predictions: People prioritize being right over minimizing how wrong they are in expectation. Management Science. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc...
A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences:
"Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
🚨From Jay Naborn & Jonathan E. Bogard:
The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts
Excited by our new work estimating the empowerment of LLM-based agents in text and code. Empowerment is the causal influence an agent has over its environment and measures an agent's capabilities without requiring knowledge of its goals or intentions.
Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!
New letter by @minzlicht.bsky.social and I forthcoming in TiCS on whether neurometabolic costs are necessary to explain cognitive fatigue. While the origins of fatigue may turn out to be metabolic, we argue there isn’t yet sufficient evidence for such theories. osf.io/preprints/ps...
That's just two possibilities. There are a ton of others that my coauthors and I have thought about.
But we haven't actually tested entitlement in students yet. Do either of those possibilities resonate with you? Or, do you have any other ideas?
Or, maybe these students don't *really* feel entitled to a higher grade, they just think they can *get* one by appealing to effort. When I show these kinds of students how much better other students performed relative to them, they typically drop their appeals.
One thing that might be going on is that students who work hard think that their performance actually is better than the teacher says it is. (After all, overachievers are used to their hard work resulting in high performance.) So, the appeals could be about performance (deep down).
Hi Dave! I totally share your intuition here. It is possible that students feel differently about their grades than adults feel about, e.g., pay and bonuses.
But, maybe the student case isn't such a clear counter-example either. I'm curious what you think:
When we started, we expected the opposite results: Hard work marks us as virtuous. Achievement, even though it creates value for others, is often a product of luck.
Our intuitive sense of entitlement may not care about how lucky we are, only whether we succeed at the work we do for others.
These findings were robust!
Workers paid themselves based on outcomes (not effort) even when they knew that others weren't working as hard as they were.
We also replicated this result across cultures who, in other surveys, appear to differ in the value of hard work and achievement.
We gave online workers short jobs to do. We varied how much effort the job induced, and how good a job the workers could do on it.
We then let workers choose their bonus for their work (which we then paid them).
Workers paid themselves based on how good they did, not how hard they worked.
What makes people feel entitled to rewards—the effort they put into their work or the outcomes they achieve?
Out now in PNAS; with Jin Kim and Jared Wong:
Achievement.
Effort seems to matter very little (if at all).
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies 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. 🧵
Really proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social.
We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…
Our incredibly short (5 page) paper on intuitions about consent — with Joanna Demaree-Cotton and @rosesomm.bsky.social
We find cases where people agree that both:
(a) There’s a sense in a which a person clearly consented
(b) In deeper sense, she did not consent at all
osf.io/63d8s
Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Please apply for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations.
psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...
There hasn’t been nearly enough appreciation for this amazing paper by Clark Barrett and
@rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
Anthropologists have observed people in certain cultures blaming agents for behavior without regard to mental states (intent, knowledge, etc.). Why does this happen?
New paper in Psychological Review!
In "Causation, Meaning, and Communication" Ari Beller (cicl.stanford.edu/member/ari_b...) develops a computational model of how people use & understand expressions like "caused", "enabled", and "affected".
📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor...
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