ana gantman

New preprint!!
Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so...
Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.

Is the Garden of Eden a story about monogamy? On Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Next substack post is up: Is the Garden of Eden really a parable about the evolution of monogamy? A post mostly about Cat Bohannon's awesome book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Social Identities Shape Belief in True & False Information

In our new paper (N=1,459), people randomly assigned to a minimal groups were more likely to trust + believe ingroup members. This was only true among people who valued their ingroup or had a strong need to belong.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Is the Garden of Eden a story about monogamy? On Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Next substack post is up: Is the Garden of Eden really a parable about the evolution of monogamy? A post mostly about Cat Bohannon's awesome book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Bean-counting by firelight on C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score & Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches

Nguyen’s The Score & Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches are a perfect set. The Score is about value capture (when metrics corrode their purpose) and Matches is about lighting a fire everyday and noticing stuff (i call it value release in the post) More here! anagantman.substack.com/p/bean-count...

and the name is a joke of course, I am definitely not trying to incept anybody with psychology knowledge by talking about things I think are fun, def not

this of course is also something that great art and culture do even better than we do as psychologists. this newsletter is about me trying to show how fun and rewarding it can be to bring these spheres into contact

i love our phrases in psych like “hedonic treadmill” or “transactive memory”--these are the things that made me want to do psych forever, they put a name to some aspect of being alive i had never really noticed before

introducing psyop a newsletter about psychology by way of culture

introducing my substack PSYOP! both psychology and art & culture can help us understand better what it's like to be a person in the world. i think they don't interact enough and this newsletter is a place for me to try to pull those two worlds together

anagantman.substack.com/p/introducin...

this is a great question! we had the same one and we piloted a version of this study where we manipulate fair vs unfair offers and we did not observe a difference

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why?

To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

1/11

The psychology of everyday authoritarianism:

Authoritarians will pay money to impose arbitrary rules on others

In a final study, we find preferences for obedience in kids predicts buying non-cooperative rules in the game but not rules that actually make the game fairer or provide better outcomes for the Receiver

But not everyone! Non-cooperative rule buying is associated with preferences for obedience in kids in both the US and China--and it's specific to non-cooperative rules.

Specifically, nearly half of U.S. participants (Study 1) and two-thirds of the Chinese participants (Study 2) bought at least one rule—more than the 33% that a separate sample of Americans forecasted would be willing to pay,anddespite judging them to be of little utility

The rules people could buy, didn't make the game fairer or improve the outcomes for the passive Receiver in a Dictator Game. We call these "non-cooperative rules.

We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Abstract of paper

Figure 1!

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help?

New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint 🚨

How do people's mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization? We find that people spontaneously construct goal-dependent causal abstractions that compress experience to privilege relevant information.

📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
🔗 github.com/cicl-stanfor...

Here's a link to access our article "People Can Find Their True Selves Outside Moral Pursuits" (Cognition) for free for the next 50 days @jowylie.bsky.social @anagantman.bsky.social 📄 📎
authors.elsevier.com/c/1lznW2Hx2-...

#moralpsychology #philsky

The dependence of children’s generalization on episodic memory varies with age and level of abstraction - Nature Communications Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

Thrilled to see this paper out! It's the culmination of a project begun in the depths of the pandemic with Sabrina Karjack and @zoengo.bsky.social . We continue our exploration of how children generalize when their episodic memory is not yet mature.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?

Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social)

Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

But they also refract them, making it possible for people to use state procedures (with all the power and access to legitimized violence this affords) to satisfy their own ends, outside of the rule of law. We argue that this is the key to understanding the psychology of authoritarianism.

How? States solve large scale coordination problems, largely with state rules and third-party punishments. State rules and state punishments codify everyday human desires for norms and rules, and third-party punishment

We propose that the everyday psychology of rules and 3rd party punishment is at the core of authoritarianism

Our view posits no new constructs, is ideology-agnostic, & considers relevant only interactions w the state

See our new working paper "Authoritarianism in Action" osf.io/preprints/ps...

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation.

We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation.

Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

One common view in moral psychology is “the primacy of the moral” - the view that people think your moral traits are what’s most fundamental about you

These new studies challenge that view, suggesting that people sometimes see artistic creation as just as fundamental as morality

indeed we find that the idea that aesthetic pursuits provide unique access to autonomy, rule-breaking, and authenticity, is partly how they provide us a feeling of nearness to our true selves. they provide an escape from the principles, rules, and conventions that define the moral domain