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Ariel Levy

@arielevy.bsky.social

74 followers 147 following 2 posts

PhD student at Harvard Department of Psychology

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Reposted by Ariel Levy

Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social

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Ariel Levy @arielevy.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

New preprint with @fierycushman.bsky.social! Cultures vary in teaching practices: some emphasize examples, others favor direct rules. How can this difference affect cultural evolution? We use computational modeling and an iterated learning experiment to explore this question. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Reposted by Ariel Levy

Sydney Levine @sydneylevine.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

I'm recruiting a grad student! My lab at NYU (psych dept) studies the computational basis of moral cognition and aims to build AI systems that are aligned with human values. Now admitting a PhD student for Fall 2026. Apps due 12/1. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

sites.google.com

Sydney Levine - Open Positions

Graduate Students (PhD program) I will be accepting PhD students through the NYU psychology department for the current application cycle (for admission in Fall 2026). My lab is joint between the Co...

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Reposted by Ariel Levy

xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

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xavier roberts-gaal @xrg.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

the functional form of moral judgment is (sometimes) the nash bargaining solution new preprint👇

figure 2 from our preprint, reporting the results from two experiments

we measure moral judgments about dividing money between two parties and manipulate the degree of asymmetry in the outside options each party has

we find that moral judgments track predictions from rational bargaining models like the nash bargaining solution and the kalai-smorodinsky solution in a negotiation context

by contrast, in a donation context, moral intuitions completely reverse, instead tracking redistributive and egalitarian principles

preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3uqks_v1

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Fred Callaway @fredcallaway.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!

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