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Reposted

Vlad Chituc @vladchituc.bsky.social · 10d

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

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Reposted

Jean-Baptiste André @jbaptistandre.bsky.social · 14d

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

🧵

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 16d

A new study by Zach Horne et al. combines history of science and psychology experiments to document the appeal of 'intrinsic' explanations: scientists and laypeople are drawn to explanations that appeal to an object's inherent properties.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

I also recommend Gervais et al.'s thoughtful reply: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

(As they highlight, their broader arguments about cultural evolution and religion are not the target of my critique, and their cross-cultural findings remain intriguing despite the interpretive difficulties)

Reply to Quillien: Intuitive preferences and interpretive humility in intentionality judgments | PNAS

Reply to Quillien: Intuitive preferences and interpretive humility in intentionality judgments

pnas.org

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

So this commentary is my small contribution to the skeptic's side of that broader debate.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

One motivation for writing this commentary: There is a large appetite in psychology for methods for covertly measuring people's implicit attitudes and preferences. But these efforts have mostly failed to live to the hype: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Self-reports are better measurement instruments than implicit measures - Nature Reviews Psychology

Implicit measures are widely used because they are assumed to be superior to self-reports. In this Perspective, Corneille and Gawronski challenge this view and argue that claims about disadvantages of...

www.nature.com

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

The problem is that this strategy would also allow us to 'infer' that people have intuitive preferences for nuclear explosions, or sending people to concentration camps:

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

People tend to attribute more intentionality to agents that did something bad. It is tempting to use this effect as a way to covertly measure people's implicit attitudes, as Will Gervais and colleagues do in a recent paper on attitudes toward atheism:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · 20d

Can we use the way that people attribute intentions to others in order to infer people's intuitive preferences and attitudes?

I've written a short letter highlighting ways that this strategy can go wrong:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences | PNAS

Intention judgments are not a reliable measure of intuitive preferences

www.pnas.org

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Reposted

Jonathan F. Kominsky @jfkominsky.bsky.social · Aug 31

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events.

My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)"

Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

🧵(1/22)

Causal Perception(s)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 20

Fantastic opportunity to join the cogsci community at Edinburgh:

Bonan Zhao (赵博囡) @bonan.bsky.social · Aug 17

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle!

We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate.

It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations.

Spread the words!

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Reposted

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Aug 2

Imagine if all the money academics pour into OA fees at for-profit publishing corporations went instead to academic societies, which exist to support science; or to university presses, which exist to support academia

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Reposted

Kartik Chandra @kartikchandra.bsky.social · Aug 2

Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…

A bar chart showing frequencies of answers to the question "Is the mind composed of innate, domain-specialized modules?" with N=197. The most prominent bars are no response (~60), yes (~30) and yo (~30). The rest of the entries are funny, e.g. "I hope so."

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

Link to the paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/86c4...

For more in this line of research see also our model of resource-limited Theory of Mind: bsky.app/profile/tade...

An information bottleneck view of social stereotype use

Author(s): Taylor-Davies, Max Louis; Quillien, Tadeg | Abstract: For decades, social psychologists have wondered about the cognitive foundations of social stereotype use. Arguments have generally cent...

escholarship.org

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

Overall, our work makes sense of why people tend to rely on social stereotypes more than they should if they were idealized Bayesian observers: they tend to preferentially allocate their limited cognitive resources to encoding group membership information.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

We also find that the optimal policy exhibits the same 'outgroup homogeneity bias' as people: it tends to represent outgroup members are more similar to each other than they are. Again, this is especially the case when cognitive resources are very limited.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

This explains why social stereotypes often act as 'energy-saving' devices for prediction, as social psychologists have found: people are for example more likely to use stereotypes when they are under cognitive load.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

Our key result: under limited resources, the optimal policy preferentially encodes information about group membership (blue) and tends to discard individuating information (teal).

This tendency only reverses if group membership has very low task relevance.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

We study agents who have to predict the behavior of other agents.

Agents have limited cognitive resources: they can only extract so much information from the environment, and have to prioritize which information to encode (group membership or individuating info).

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

When predicting someone's behavior, people typically rely on both:
-individuating information (e.g. what that person did in the past),
-group membership,
We want to explain why people integrate these two types of information as they do, working from first principles.

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Aug 2

Our new #cogsci2025 paper led by @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social is a task analysis of agent representation under resource constraints:
🧵

Max Taylor-Davies @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social · Aug 1

At #CogSci2025 and curious about resource-rational models of social cognition? Come to Nob Hill A at 11:14 tomorrow to hear me talk about work with @tadegquillien.bsky.social where we use the information bottleneck to study stereotype use and the outgroup homogeneity bias!

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Reposted

Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher.bsky.social · Aug 1

Recent studies suggest that manipulating "growth mindset" might not improve students' academic performance

This new research suggests that it has a different effect. Growth mindset makes people more inclined to *blame* students for their failures

escholarship.org/content/qt4k...

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Reposted

Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · Jul 29

Really loving this kind of engagement between the psychology and philosophy of causation.

So much better than psychologists re-explaining how people are just oh so irrational and philosophers examining their intuitions about increasingly elaborate tales of rock throwing and firing squads 😉

tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Jul 28

New short paper with @kevingoneill.github.io and Paul Henne: We re-analyse data from a recent study on causal judgment, and find that a counterfactual model explains why temporal order influences people's intuitions.
🧵
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: Commentary on Thanawala and Erb (2024)

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the vi…

www.sciencedirect.com

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tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Jul 28

Our pre-print is at osf.io/preprints/ps...

Code is available at osf.io/acmsh/

For more background on the CES model: quillienlab.github.io/Quillien%20&...

For more on double prevention see e.g. quillienlab.github.io/O%27Neill,%2...

A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: commentary on Thanawala & Erb (2024)

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the view that people have multiple concepts of causation...

osf.io

tadegquillien.bsky.social @tadegquillien.bsky.social · Jul 28

There is more in the paper, including implications for debates over causal pluralism, double prevention, etc.

I also highly recommend the original paper by Thanawala & Erb: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
And their thoughtful response to our piece: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Revisiting causal pluralism: Intention, process, and dependency in cases of double prevention

Causal pluralism proposes that humans can reason about causes and effects in terms of both dependency and process relations, depending on the scenario…

www.sciencedirect.com

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