The demands of complex social life are thought to drive the evolution of cognition in primates. One important approach to testing this hypothesis is to assess if variation in psychological processes i...

Abstract. The exchange of reasons in rational discourse is crucial for resolving disagreements. In a preregistered cross-cultural study, 360 5- to 9-year-o

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Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars - Volume 8

People often form beliefs and reason about evidence as members of social groups. Here, the authors show that group membership biases even young children’s evaluation of evidence, leading them to adopt...

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Communications Psychology - Groups of two or four chimpanzees encountered a collective resource sustainability problem. Quartets avoided resource collapse for longer than dyads, with group social...

His groundbreaking field research was instrumental in banning the international ivory trade and protecting elephants from poachers.

Social life is a continuous interplay of observing and interacting with conspecifics, predicting their behavior, and responding to their actions. This…

The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

People use various strategies to bolster the perception of their competence. One strategy is self-handicapping, by which people deliberately impede th…

The Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) seeks a full-time Research Coordinator (acting lab manager) to help launch and coordinate the Minds,.....

Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

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A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

Women are more likely to take on behind-the-scenes duties at work—extra tasks like onboarding or event planning—and it's hurting their careers. Here's how to say no.

Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent rese…

Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent research demonstrating that disagreement prompts competent responses by young children across several metacognitive domains (confidence monitoring, information search, and source monitoring). We then propose a mechanistic model of how disagreement facilitates metacognition. We localize one main source of children’s metacognitive limitations in their still-developing capacities to reason about alternative possibilities, which manifest in an overly narrow focus on one hypothesis. Disagreement increases the child’s likelihood of representing alternative hypotheses, thereby promoting improved metacognitive reasoning. The broader proposal is that, through repeated experiences of disagreement, children become better at representing alternative possibilities even when reasoning on their own, leading to metacognitive development.

Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little ...

Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little is known about the developmental and evolutionary roots ...