Fiery Cushman

Human cognition functions most effectively when individuals intentionally curate their own information intake rather than passively absorbing… Active Learning by Azzurra Ruggeri https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/go1i5g7i #CognitiveScience

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Collective deliberation leads to large, reductons in affective polarization Deliberation requires that people use good information to “weigh” competing arguments through civil and diverse discussion The impact was strongest among the most extreme www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I'm very excited to share a new preprint with you all (5 years in the making). "Making good decisions with counterfactuals" with Ricky Ma, Scott Mueller, and Thomas Icard. We investigate how people combine experimental and observational data to make decisions. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Stereotypes influence face-based first impressions...but how? In a new preprint with @brandon-cohen-1.bsky.social and @youngkihong.bsky.social, we show that people require less facial "evidence" to infer stereotype-consistent traits. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/15 What do we actually do when we deliberate, and how does it change over time? New preprint with @wimdeneys.bsky.social : "Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning". 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf... (yes, I like flashy titles 💅) A 🧵👇

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

👶🧠 Pequay, E., & Dautriche, I. (2026). The development of compositionality in language and thought. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 8. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1146/annu...

🚨 It's published! 🚨 This is the big one. 100 cultures, 12,000 people, 108 researchers. Why people (and our most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.nature.com

Our newest work unifying game theoretic ideas about the evolution of cooperation with the emergence of computation itself. Self-replicating programs first emerge through random mutation and then spread by cooperating.

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...

My first paper (with Jared Vasil and Mike Tomasello) is officially published! 🎉 Question: When can children coordinate decisions with each other in groups? Answer: Age 3! Read it here: academic.oup.com/chidev/advan... 🧵 (1/6)

The Stanford Psychology Department is having a search for a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Application deadline is 10/15. More infos here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

new paper out: *~*~*~*~ "Revisiting the 5- to 7-Y ear Shift: The Age of Metacognitive Control?" (by Brod @garvinbrod.bsky.social , McAuliffe @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social , Ullman) *~*~*~*~ sharable paper link: bit.ly/5to7_2026 free pdf draft: www.tomerullman.org/papers/5to7s...

Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... I found this paper relevant to understand society's tolerance or lack of it, for people who are unable to work for reasons of poor mental health.

OK, so no one cares, but lately I've been feeling really jazzed about *social convention*! My paper "Convention for One" will be published in Thought, and argues we have conventions with ourselves that are very much like standard group conventions cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/u...

Agents of possibility: Specifying which person an event involved helps children gauge what is possible 🚨Recent work by Brandon W. Goulding, Samuel Ronfard & Ori Friedman

We worry about homogenisation, but can AI also expand human culture? In a multi-generational experiment we demonstrate AI-induced cultural shifts. Machines lastingly shift human behavior, beyond their presence, just as AlphaGo did to Go. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

When is language needed for human culture to accumulate? When observing successful behavior is not enough to recover the mental model behind it! This is an incredibly ambitious project, involving large-scale experimentation, RL and ABM modeling, and computational language analyses.

Reason-giving isn't a Western invention. New in Child Development: 360 children aged 5–9 in China, Kenya & the US spontaneously gave each other reasons to settle disagreements — and did so more when they disagreed than when they agreed. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Why do children claim unusual events are impossible? In a new paper with Goulding, Ronfard (@samuelronfard.bsky.social), and Friedman (@orifriedman.bsky.social), we synthesize two decades of research on children's possibility judgments and propose some answers. www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

new preprint! in my final grad school project led by @kmiceli.bsky.social & @ninavanrooy.bsky.social w/@felipedebrigard.bsky.social, we challenge ~20yrs of causal cognition research by finding a context in which people's causal judgments are completely *unaffected* by norms! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper in @nature.com with @lukebeehewitt.bsky.social, @isaiasghezae.bsky.social, & @robbwiller.bsky.social: Can LLMs predict results of social science experiments? Across 70 experiments, we find a strong correspondence (r=.85) between predicted and observed effects. doi.org/10.1038/s415... 🧵

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

🍄 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🍄 I, and others, have previously drawn a comparison between the classic “cost-avoidance” argument for social learning and the central idea of resource rationality... (1/8)

Yale is hiring in developmental psychology (open rank )! We're especially interested in complementing and broadening our area, including via somewhat less traditionally central such as cross-cultural and comparative approaches. Feel free to reach out with questions!

New paper out today in Social and Personality Psychology Compass! What happens when our moral values come into conflict? Our new paper explores "metamorality": the second-order principles we use to navigate conflicting moral choices. W/ Jesse Graham

Now out in Noûs: A communication-first account of explanation, with Jacqueline Harding (jacquelineharding.github.io) and Thomas Icard (stanford.edu/~icard/). Paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.03732

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

What's more nonsensical: smashing a pumpkin using a number, or growing flowers inside a sneeze? Our paper on graded inconceivability is out now in Cognition! Come for the cognitive science 🧠🔍, stay for the whimsy 🌼🧚! 🔗Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog

If you have (or will soon) complete your PhD & would like to join a thriving cultural evolution research group in NEW ZEALAND, drop me a line. UoA offers a handful of funded research fellowships. Applications must be made by a faculty member. Deadline August. Pls share with your students

Levine @sydneylevine.bsky.social et al.'s "Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition" is out in BBS, highly worth your time: bit.ly/BBSLevine26 if you had time left, I had thoughts: "Non-negotiable problems for a negotiation framework of morality" bit.ly/BBSTUCom26

Some of the first work related to my ERC is now available as a preprint 👉 arxiv.org/pdf/2606.20623 We model the learning of real-world melodies as resource-constrained inference over generative programs, with new implications for Rate-distortion theory: learning changes what is cheap to encode! 🧵👇

New paper with Ángel Jiménez, @keith-jensen.bsky.social, Lei Chang and Hui Jing Lu Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

I wrote a book! It's called WHY WE ASK WHY, and it's about the human drive to explain, combining psychology, philosophy, and stories. It will be released on October 6, but it's currently available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble at 25% off with code PREORDER25.

Representing possible alternatives lies at the heart of moral judgment. As LLMs become embedded in our reasoning processes, they change the set of alternatives we bring to mind. 💭 Our #CogSci2026 paper shows that AI might be making us judge people harsher. ⚖️ osf.io/preprints/ps...

Children's prosocial and selfish rule-breaking following an implicit quid pro quo 🚨Recent work by Leon Li and Sebastian Grueneisen

Children learn what is right or wrong selectively from a legitimate authority’s punishment 
‼️Work by Young-eun Lee, Setayesh Radkani & Rebecca Saxe

I have been so excited about this project. In many ways the most surprising thing to me was how seemingly similar the AI-discovered models were to simple ones I thought I understood, even though they fit way better. This means we can also really get what makes them work.

Why do humans punish? Our new paper, with @manvir.bsky.social, is out in Psychological Science! With experiments in a small-scale society (Mentawai) & the US, we test whether punitive cognition evolved to deter wrongdoing or restore fairness. link: tinyurl.com/msrmu7cc pdf: tinyurl.com/mvprz8fb

Semantic knowledge is key for human innovation and cultural evolution! Our paper (thread in repost), led by fantastic @anilyaman.bsky.social & rising star @ts-brain.bsky.social is out in @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... I will present this work at APS Barcelona (29/5), happy to chat!

Pointing out that “everyone else is already doing it!” is a classic way to motivate prosocial behavior. But how can we encourage actions which aren't popular yet? In a new paper in @jexpsocpsych.bsky.social, Mike Norton and I had a lot of fun testing a method using "collective streaks." (1/5)

Aside from testing the MR view, we offer a new theoretical take on why kids fail. Kids conceptualize the goal of object retrieval tasks exactly as adults do betting. When we bet on horses, we don't spread bets across all options, but try to pick a winner. When FORCED to spread bets, kids succeed.

📣Recent work from Bill Pepe, Brandon Woo, Ashley Thomas & Lindsey Powell: Infants use helping to infer the existence and strength of caring relationships