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
in my decision making class I run a version of The Endowment Effect that goes like this:
When students come in, sealed envelopes are waiting on their chair-arms.
The main slide that greets them says 'NO TOUCHING'
Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.
Peer review meltdown in one diagram.
Greater emphasis on glamour journals leads people to try their luck with mediocre papers. This drains the review pool (they often have to be re-reviewed elsewhere). That drops the accuracy of peer review, creating more incentive to submit mediocre papers…
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
Thanks @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on "Using the information bottleneck to study social cognition". Max develops resource-rational models that elegantly unify existing theories for various phenomena such as stereotyping and ToM development.
📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...
This general finding holds when controlling for the participant's gender, their attitude toward gender relations, etc, suggesting that this reflects something fundamental about the conceptual structure of 'person'.
For instance, if you ask people to think of the first person that comes to mind, it will most often be a man.
Or if you look at how people use language, male-related words are closer in semantic space to person-related words than female-related words are.
The key insight:
Research on the structure of concepts has shown that we have 'prototypes'. E.g. if you think of a bird, you are more likely to think of a robin than an ostrich.
When it comes to the concept of 'person', most people's prototype of that concept seems to be male.
My student Madeleine Horner interviewed @ahbailey.bsky.social about her fascinating research on gender and the prototype of the person concept:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYDg...
I suppose every biologist would write quite different essays on TSG. My take, for what it's worth, is that in TSG and followups, Dawkins aimed to introduce the public to the developments in evolutionary biology sparked by Hamilton, Williams, Maynard Smith and Price, Trivers, and other folks working that tradition, which has settled on “evolved strategy” as a core concept. This body of work, which today is generally referred to as behavioral ecology and evolutionary game theory, has the same goal as Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, and especially, The Descent of Man (i.e., sexual selection), but now using the understanding of heritable variation from the Modern Synthesis.
The Selfish Gene (TSG) was published 50 yrs ago. I was recently asked about Dawkins' concep of the selfish gene in light of my review many years ago of Burt & Trivers' book on selfish genetic elements: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Here is my response (lightly edited): 🧪 #BioAnth 1/14
Really interesting study on the effect of ingroup / outgroup dynamics on causal judgment:
Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
🧵
Our paper on the human brain networks sensitive to geometric shape is now final in @elife.bsky.social, with nice videos by Mathias Sablé-Meyer explaining each figure!
A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
From X: Renaud Foucart @RenaudFoucart Few people now this but the Epstein library can be used to bypass academic journal paywalls. You search for a paper and if someone sent it to Epstein the pdf is there.
New sci-hub just dropped.
Great paper giving a rational explanation for the gambler's "fallacy".
I'm excited to share that my first paper "Guessing and its Limits" is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research!
Thread below. TLDR: I present a novel puzzle for a recent "question-sensitive" theory of guessing/belief in multi-question scenarios.
philpapers.org/rec/FANGAI-2
a project I really like, now officially out!
"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"
by Qian and me
paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
I'll walk through a quick version here
To get a sense of it, first consider:
Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?
For example they both can be used in conjunction with desire representations for predicting someone's behavior:
-John opened the fridge because he wanted a beer and believed there was a beer there,
-John opened the fride because he wanted a beer and knew there was a beer there.
Now the question is whether the knowledge representations (that we share with other primates) belong to the same conceptual system as the belief representations (which might be uniquely human).
An argument that suggests that they do is that both representations can interact with the same concepts,
I think this is still an empirical question to some extent.
But it makes sense to me that ToM would be a unified thing. For example, in this experiment monkeys seem to be able to represent knowledge. Humans also seem to have knowledge representations, in addition to belief representations,
I think it's difficult to definitely rule that out. But to some extent the experiment where the agent knows the location of the apple (and the monkeys do make a prediction) shows that the task can induce monkeys to pay attention.
Note that this is a good heuristic if you use your own understanding of reality to predict the behavior of other agents (a strategy called 'factive' mindreading). When reality changes outside of the agent's awareness, then the real state of the world is not longer a reliable guide to their behavior.
One interpretation of these results:
Monkeys can represent the mental states of other agents in some form. But when reality changes outside of the agent's awareness, they completely discard this representation.
In contrast, in an easier task where the agent knows the location of the apple, monkeys are surprised if the agent doesn't reach there.
Instead, monkeys appear to make *no prediction* about how an agent with a false belief will behave. If the agent reaches for the Blue box (a completely irrelevant location), monkeys are no more surprised than if the agent reaches for one of the other boxes.
Monkeys saw an agent who (falsely) believes that the apple is in the Red box. The monkey knows that the apple is actually in the Green box.
If monkeys attribute their own knowledge to the other agent, they would predict that the agent would look in the Green box...
A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.
A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.
Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
