A lot of research suggests that social cognition involves representations of Welfare-Tradeoff Ratios (WTRs), an index of how much someone values someone else.
Here we find evidence for such representations in children, who make queries that are maximally informative about a partner's WTR.
Next week, I will be presenting this work and some extensions at #HBES2026 in Rabat, Morocco.
Happy to connect!
I last published in a Frontiers journal in 2012, when I thought their publishing model was bad. It's SO much worse now, but also such a stark consequences of the pathology of publications-as-currency plaguing academia.
Congratulations to the winners of the #HBES2026 Don Symons Adaptationism Award: Michael Barlev & Steven Neuberg, for “Rational Reasons for Irrational Beliefs” (2025)
psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...
New paper accepted as a proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society: "Inferring arithmetic skills from speed and accuracy”!
We tested whether people were optimal in their inference of others' math skills.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!
Looking forward to presenting this work soon at #Hbes2026
Congratulations to our #HBES2026 Early Career Award winners: Daniel Conroy-Beam and Anne Pisor! 🎓
Marius Mercier
Marius Mercier
Human Behavior & Evolution Society
Paul Smaldino
New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵
Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social!
Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6
Barbu Revencu
Human Behavior & Evolution Society
Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.
