Cancel your meetings and gaze upon the soul of my sweet Jersey www.nj.com/news/2025/12...
Eric Mandelbaum
Eric Mandelbaum
@ericman.bsky.social
CUNY Prof of Philosophy & Psychology, Director of Cognitive Science, other stuff too
2.3K followers410 following215 posts
Eric Mandelbaum reposted
there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence 1/
There’s growing evidence that something was going seriously wrong in the classic early work on cognitive dissonance Latest revelation: The story in When Prophecy Fails seems to have been fabricated in the most egregious way But this is not the only one… onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Fantastic researcher, open-minded thinker, dedicated mentor, and one of the absolute nicest people in the field.
I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏
My friends @foddy.net and @gcuzzillo.bsky.social's game @babystepsgame.bsky.social came out today and it looks amazing. @foddy.net is an artist and philosopher in the truest sense of the words, who just happens to be using video games as his medium at the moment: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/a...
See also www.ign.com/articles/bab...) "I wasn’t expecting one of my favorite games of 2025 to be about a socially awkward blob in a stained onesie with such poor motor skills that he ragdolls to the ground on the slightest of uneven surfaces, but here we are."--IGN & www.polygon.com/baby-steps-r...
Eric Mandelbaum reposted
Our entry (with @ericman.bsky.social ) for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, “The Language of Thought Hypothesis”, is now out. doi.org/10.21428/e27...
It was so great! Really lucky to have been able to listen and learn from Barbara, Liuba, & Benedek. Some of the most insightful research happening today, from just the absolutely nicest, coolest people.
Heading for my last day of the ESPP in Warsaw. Amazing to see philosophers and psychologists in one room. It was a privilege to talk about how symbols and compositionality emerge in babies alongside @ljubapi.bsky.social and @benedek.bsky.social 💕 to @ericman.bsky.social for organizing the symposium!
Excited about this in large part because Raphael is the absolute best
Happy to share this updated Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on 'Associationist Theories of Thought' with @ericman.bsky.social. Among other things, we included a new major section on reinforcement learning. Many thanks to Eric for bringing me on board! plato.stanford.edu/entries/asso...
This work is so cool, (and Vlad rules to boot)
Do women feel some emotions more strongly than men do? Out today in Affective Science, I argue that claims like this make a notoriously subtle mistake. What is it? And what does it have to do with an astigmatic painter and thyroid medicine? A short thread... (1/14)
Eric Mandelbaum reposted
A key takeaway from 20+ years of computational RL is: model-free=automatic, model-based=deliberate. My new paper w/ @benedek.bsky.social challenges this view, suggesting that MB algos are more ubiquitous, & automatic processing more sophisticated, than currently thought: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
This is really impressive. Hard to imagine a more painful (or dangerous) rollercoaster than the Cyclone: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWi_...
Eric Mandelbaum reposted
📄 NEW PRE-PRINT! 📄 How do we acquire beliefs? According to one intuitive view, we can entertain thoughts, and then choose to accept them as beliefs or reject them. philpapers.org/rec/PIOBWW (🧵1/10)
Eric Mandelbaum reposted
Excited to share a new paper accepted to @cogscisociety.bsky.social 2025 on the cognitive representation polysemy and their use in reasoning! Pre-print here: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Thread below! (🧵1/9)
Congrats Shannon! Can't wait to celebrate with you in Ithaca
It's my honor to announce the 2025 winner of the Stanton Prize given out by the Society of Philosophy and Psychology (drum roll 🥁): Shannon Spaulding 🏆 Huge congratulations!! Make sure to see Shannon's prize lecture at the SPP conference at Cornell this June. www.socphilpsych.org/meetings.html
Quitting my job to help unravel the "Baseball Maiming Society Industrial Complex" Foul Ball Safety Now! www.publishersmarketplace.com/jobs/view.cg...
If you really love somebody, let them know by never emailing them
1. From morning EST to evening PST, I receive an email roughly once every three minutes. Overnight the pace slows, but not all that much. If I did nothing but read email and reply 12 hours a day I could probably keep up. A once-wonderful productivity technology is killing any hope of productivity.
Once again @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social is doing the coolest work.
New preprint from the lab: the geometric regularity effect in quadrilaterals, which we documented in the visual modality with @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, is also present in the tactile modality in congenitally blind participants— hence likely arising from an amodal Language-of-Thought.
This is a great idea in cognitive science and philosophy too. I would stop being a zealot for signing referee reports if they were just published alongside the paper
We should at a minimum do what Nature does, in which the referee comments and author responses are published along with the paper. Allows the paper itself to be an authoritative artifact while lifting the curtain on the debate that led its creation. (quoting @dholtz.bsky.social ) 4/