New preprint! ✨ Do you and your partner have made-up words ("eggy" to mean awkward)? Do you and your bestie have an anecdote you love to tell together (that time one of you tripped over an acorn)? Do you and your closest colleague have a cherished ritual (weekly lunch at "the usual spot")? 🧵

Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123

📣 New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which we investigated whether conversational alignment — the tendency to reuse each other's words, syntactic constructions, topics, sounds and gestures — can be used as a reliable individual trait. It cannot!
🧵 1/4

doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

How do we make new friends after moving? Primarily through work/classes or through friends of friends….and making friends via “friends of friends” predicts greater happiness, meaning, and psychological richness

@chriswelker.bsky.social #SPSP2026

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth.

Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word!

More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to announce this year's Shared Reality Virtual Conference happening Wednesday March 12 & Thursday March 13, 2025, between 9:50 AM - 1:10 PM ET!

You can register below to receive the Zoom link! Submit a data blitz anytime until Feb 7.
northwestern.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

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I've started working on a (very incomplete!) starter pack for social interaction researchers! If you're working in this space, please asked to be added (or suggest others)! Meant to be inclusive of many disciplines, methods, interaction types, and types of interacting agents: go.bsky.app/44VAEhU

Schematic illustration of the organization of social knowledge, featuring representational spaces for actions, mental states, personality traits, and situations, with predictive links within and between these layers of knowledge.

Schematic illustration of how mental state dynamics could give rise to the representational geometry people apply to understand these states.

Now in press at AESP, from @dianatamir.bsky.social & me: "Predicting other people shapes the social mind" doi.org/10.1016/bs.a...