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Overall, most classic evidence for reciprocity and turn-taking comes from experiments between anonymous strangers, who are implicitly equal. Our results suggest that this might be a special case, and that much of social life seems to run on following a precedent.

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We also asked whether minimal descriptions of relationships shape people's behavior in incentivized economic games. In these cases, people also expected a precedent — even when it meant repeatedly giving at a personal cost — except for the relationship was equal.

Expectations of following a precedent came from two sources: priors about who "should" be generous in a given situation, and an abstract rule that whatever happened last time should happen again.

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These expectations held regardless of whether the lower- or higher-rank person was generous, in both abstract and concrete descriptions of relationships (e.g., "asymmetric" vs. "advisor-student"), and were not based on the costs/benefits of acting generously.

Reciprocity was specific to equal relationships, and following a precedent was expected in hierarchical relationships:

We first tested third-party judgments of vignettes in familiar U.S. social situations (e.g., bringing coffee to a meeting). Participants observed one generous act and predicted who would be generous in the next interaction.

In this paper, we experimentally tested the prediction, articulated most explicitly in Debt by David Graeber, that in hierarchical relationships, people expect generous acts to set a precedent (for the same person to be generous again).

Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

A common assumption in economics and psychology is that a generous act creates a debt that's expected to be repaid. Yet anthropologists and sociologists have long thought of generous acts as not just based on their payoffs, but as ways to create and sustain different kinds of social relationships.

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Reposted by Alicia Chen

Hi everyone! My paper on cognitive representations of relationships and their developmental origins is finally out! I had a blast responding to the commentary and was honored to be able to engage with people who laid the foundation for my research program. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins - Volume 49

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Reposted by Alicia Chen

Jae-Young Son @jaeyoungson.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

How do we represent maps of social relationships in the mind & brain? To find out, we tracked 1st-year university students’ friendships, as well as students’ *beliefs* about who was friends with whom in their network. Yang breaks down what we found in the quoted thread 👇🏻 Broader context below:

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Reposted by Alicia Chen

Ashley Thomas @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Hossein was supposed to come to my lab as a grad student but couldn’t because of the travel ban. I had a blast writing this paper with him, but it was bittersweet knowing he should have been in person with us. ❤️ check out 🧵below. part of a special issue on kissing led by Deb Lieberman.

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Reposted by Alicia Chen

Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

arxiv.org

What does it mean to understand language?

Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

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PDF available here: aliciamchen.github.io/files/chen20... (8/8)

aliciamchen.github.io

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Thanks to my co-authors Matthias Hofer (co-first), @moshepoliak.bsky.social, @rplevy.bsky.social, and @nogazs.bsky.social Thanks also to our editor @kennysmithed.bsky.social and our anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback! (7/8)

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These results suggest that when both signals and meanings are continuous, predictable non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships may play a central role in the emergence of effective communication systems. (6/8)

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But what kind of structure actually helps people communicate better? Only systematicity (and how well partners’ systems aligned with each other) robustly predicted communicative success. (5/8)

Plot depicting coefficient estimates in a linear model, with bars as 95% confidence intervals. The predictors are learning score, alignment, systematicity, number of clusters, and Hopkins statistic (a discreteness metric). Systematicity and alignment are significant predictors; the others are not.

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We found that participants developed communication systems that displayed both discreteness (clustering of whistled signals into distinct word-like groups), and systematicity (the signals are predictably organized, in a way that corresponds to what they refer to in the world). (4/8)

Qualitative assessment of the use of systematicity. (a) A one-dimensional MDS embedding of the emergent signaling systems. Each
pair of lines corresponds to the two partners in a game. Each dot corresponds to a signal, and is colored by its target color. The games are
sorted by their average communication score. (b) A two-dimensional MDS visualization of all emergent signals across all dyads. As in (a),
each dot corresponds to a signal and is colored by its target color. Black squares correspond to the initialization signals.

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After learning five whistle-color pairings as "common ground," they had to generalize this common ground to communicate about 40 colors. This setup lets us look at what kinds of strategies people develop, under communicative pressure. (3/8)

Experimental setup. In the learning phase (a), participants learn five initialization signal-color pairings (signals shown are a visualization
of pitch over time). In the communication phase (b), participants are assigned speaker and listener roles, and have to extrapolate their
learned signals to communicate about a total of forty colors.

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We ran an interactive communication experiment where participants were paired with another partner and used alien whistle sounds — fully continuous pitch contours — to communicate about colors. (2/8)

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