Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we show that, from just the mention of a role, people build rapid expectations about how other people will act, what they know, and whether they can be interchange...

Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...

Humans face the adaptive challenge of assessing how much other people value them. Evidence suggests that the human mind is well-equipped for this task…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

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In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in call similarity between individuals). However, testing this causal effect can be difficult, because it requires ...

Many animals produce sounds during courtship and receivers prefer some sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergent evolution may generate similarities in preference across species and could und...

Pokémon Legends: Arceus, relevent again upon the release of Legends: Z-A, makes an awkward job of engaging with history - but Game Freak should continue to try.

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences

“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfold sequentiall…

Recent research from economics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and marketing is increasingly interested in the idea that people face cognitive costs when making decisions. Reviewing ...

In much recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science, repulsive adaptation effects are considered a litmus test — a crucial marker, that distinguis…

Blog posts and talk slides

Humans are adept at navigating the social world in part because we flexibly map the locations and identities of agents around us. While field studies suggest primates can track individual conspecifics...

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Alt: Bill Murray raises a glass of whisky

Pursuing a scientific idea is often justified by the promise associated with it. Philosophers of science have proposed various ways of unpacking this idea of promise, including more specific indicator...

Can we see only how things actually are, or are we also able to see how things could be? Much work in philosophy of perception assumes that our visual perceptual experience is restricted to the actua....

Smart people are sometimes the last to realize that the cognitive ship they are captaining is about to sink.

The external appearance of the human eye has been prominently linked to the evolution of complex sociocognitive functions in our species. The cooperative eye hypothesis (CEH) proposes that human eyeb...

A case study of one university’s managerial misadventures, why it is happening and what we can do about it. Click to read Quentin’s Substack, by Quentin Atkinson, a Substack publication. Launched a mo...

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Many anthropologists and economists contend that humans are characterized by strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary root