Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively?
Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social!
And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!
🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨
ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts.
internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/
Interview with philosopher/psychologist @felipedebrigard.bsky.social. Discusses his work, but also more personal aspects of his life
Quotation here is about what it was like growing up during a very violent period in the history of Colombia
www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com#/felipe-de-b...
Grades at Harvard are broken, we can quantify just how badly they're broken, and they can vote today to fix it. I hope they do, and I hope the rest of us follow their lead.
vladchituc.substack.com/p/your-grade...
🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Pre-doc Researcher/Lab Manager! 🚨🚨
Full-time pre-doc research opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026).
Review begins April 10
Apply: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive...
Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit! 👇
I wrote this article to explain in plain English what is happening with the proposed 2027 NSF budget & why so many social psychologists are alarmed.
THE GOOD NEWS: Congress has not finalized this yet. We have time to change Republican politicians’ minds.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/saving...
cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature
out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)
he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals
doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202
I'm pleased to drop the webpage for tomorrow's Consortium on Moral Decision-Making moral measures workshop. Click to see the schedule for the afternoon, including talk titles, abstracts, bios, & more. Monday March 23 from 1:30-5:00p.m. EDT, hybrid #psychscisky
moralconsortium.psu.edu/events/moral...
This Monday, we will be holding a hybrid workshop on methodology through the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making! More details at the link, including details about how to register. Excellent talks by early career researchers at Penn State and beyond. Please attend if you are interested, and share!
I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...
Damnnnnnn
ayyyy lets gooooooo
my brother in christ .02 is the standardly accepted lower limit lmao
i have spent years training for this (some fun color psychophysics) www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Bar chart of 25 countries showing the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good or bad. Main finding is that in many countries, people see their fellow citizens as morally good, but in the U.S. stands out, with 53% of U.S. adults saying Americans have bad morals and ethics.
New @pewresearch.org report from my team on views of morality around the world finds that across the 25 countries surveyed, the U.S. stands out with 53% of U.S. adults saying Americans have bad morals and ethics.
Full report: pewrsr.ch/4ubNwaM
1/
that was exactly the question I wanted to ask if there was more time! Are behavioral economists activists for studying how to get people to save more? What does activist even mean in this context?? This is like a pillar of behavioral science.
If you're at #SPSP2026, come check out what folks in my lab are up to!
(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions.
@brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here:
rdcu.be/e5SWo
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty — across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Imagination in bonobos!
I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org
We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative
youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
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...
My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here:
forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...
Recent DSLC.io club meetings:
🔵 Cookbook: Bee colony losses: visualizing quantities with Poisson disk sampling youtu.be/PQz7gUBkFI4
Support the Data Science Learning Community at patreon.com/DSLC
#dataBS #TidyTuesday #RStats #DataViz #ggplot2
Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"
Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.
Let’s fund the ‘shooting random citizens in the face’ organization at either slightly lower levels, or at somewhat higher levels but they have to sit through some more training before they’re deployed to American cities
Saw an ancestor of this paper as a talk and liked it a lot! Glad to see it’s found a good home. Everything Matthias does is must-read imho
Extremely telling that Americans will take to the street to virtue signal over one woman being shot but were mostly silent on the nine month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh aka Artsakh by the authoritarian Aliyevan regime in 2023.
I still fondly remember arguing with you in the comments as a young man :’)
Graphic with a dark teal background announcing “Nominations for the Glushko Dissertation Prize are open until January 19.” The words “Glushko Dissertation Prize” appear large in bright green, with “January 19” highlighted.
⏳Closing in 2 WEEKS!
Nominate an outstanding dissertation in cognitive science for the Glushko Dissertation Prize.
Up to five winners will receive $10,000 each. Self-nominations encouraged.
Deadline for nomination: January 19 🗓️
👉 cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-diss...