Benedek Kurdi
Experimental psychologist studying social learning and memory, assistant professor @psychillinois.bsky.social, SAB chair @projectimplicit.bsky.social, AE at JEP:G & @openmindjournal.bsky.social, immigrant, 🏳️🌈, he/him
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiImagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiWhy do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiMcGill is hiring a faculty lecturer in social psychology, in a (non-adjunct) permanent teaching position. Please consider being my colleague, Montreal is really great: mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiSPSP is just around the corner and in our backyard of Chicago! @lydiaemery.bsky.social and I love the Chicago food scene, and we've put together a list of places we like. We hope this will help you enjoy and explore Chicago!! See y'all soon!! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiHey, help us out with this search and repost this announcement. Thanks.
- Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Tenure-Track Position at Western Washington University. This is an assistant professor position in applied cognitive psychology. Short 🧵 about this position. 1/? Here is the link with details and for applying: hr.wwu.edu/careers-facu...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiWhat motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiI just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch New paper out by Paolini et al. on habit-ruptures in intergroup contact www.nature.com/articles/s44... (If you like that, our also team has a related paper in press at American Psychologist, led by Rose Meleady) psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @hcr-journal.bsky.social, I show how endorsements of entertainment media from ingroup members, particularly inpartisans, affect exposure intentions, with differential effects across racial lines. #PolComm #PoliSci #Politics #MediaStudies 🧵
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiCAIC has been hard at work creating an interdisciplinary hub for pursuing big questions in cognitive science. This spring we are excited to officially launch the Cognition, Agency, Intelligence Conference featuring talks by an amazing lineup of interdisciplinary researchers. See you on April 2-3! 🥳
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdiarxiv.org/abs/2601.11432 I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiProject Implicit is facing an existential threat. After almost 30 years, 60 million visitors, and hundreds of published papers, funding for our work has disappeared. We’ve never held a fundraising drive before, but we need your support to keep our site running. Please consider donating! 🙏
- Project Implicit is a research nonprofit behind tools millions use to understand bias. Like many public science orgs, sustaining this work has become increasingly difficult. We are at risk of closing without additional support. Help protect this impt work by donating here: 4agc.com/donate/impli...
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdia project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiCall for Applications! APS's Editorial Fellowship Program (EFP) is now OPEN #AcademicSky 📝 Evaluate submitted manuscripts 🔍 Select and invite reviewers 🤝 Receive mentorship across five APS journals 💵 US $1,000 stipend Learn more & apply by February 6 www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiA fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiExperimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name. "These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdipostdoc opportunity! would be a good fit for an intergroup person with NLP chops interested in the role of historical narratives bonus, Edinburgh is a phenomenal city to live in with wonderful, walkable quality of life elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew paper with Junyi Chu, Tomer Ullman et al showing that kids think more difficulty is more fun! Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew preprint in advance of a Phil Trans paper. Outlining a theoretical argument bridging Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning. And empirical data that kids do too! arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiWe are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiWe are hiring! The Department of Network and Data Science of Central European University (Vienna) has an open position for an Assistant Professor in network science and computational social science.
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew paper alert! "Public Speakers With Nonnative Accents Garner Less Engagement" -- now out in Psych Science! This is my first graduate student's first first-author paper (and it was her first-year project). Short THREAD on the results:
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social, we (w/ @dkreiss.bsky.social, @danlane.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social) critique political communication's "Identity Turn" and offer instead a foundation for studying #polcomm from a *group* perspective. 🧵
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiAge is an important predictor of many behaviors & yet we know little about how children understand it. Early studies suggest they don't know much & conflate age with physical size. Here, @kostaboskovic.bsky.social revisits this consensus & shows even 3-yr-olds use multiple cues to reason about age.
- New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew paper in press at JPSP! An adversarial collaboration focusing on a large-scale test of how strongly implicit racial attitudes predict discriminatory behavior. Pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi#AcademicSky #PsycSciSky Editors, looking for a reviewer? I know a PhD student looking for more experience. With publishing experience. Bright etc. feel free to DM me if looking (re: prejudice, contact, ideology, dehumanization)
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiHow do people form beliefs about complex topics? Happy to report our Bayesian model of the psychology of Bayesian updating is out in @ispp-pops.bsky.social! (w/ Gabriel Li & Krosnick) If you gloss over the Greek, it's a new model for how to assess the impacts of information on summary judgments.
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi1/10 🚨 New preprint: Using Large Language Models to Estimate Belief Strength in Reasoning 🚨 When asked: "There are 995 politicians and 5 nurses. Person 'L' is kind. Is Person 'L' more likely to be a politician or a nurse?", most people will answer "nurse", neglecting the base-rate info. A 🧵👇
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch scholars will want to check this out journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiCogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof). We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice! international.au.dk/about/profil...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiThrilled to share my new article in Political Psychology: “The psychology of political attitudinal volatility.” In it, I attempt to answer why do some people change their political views more than others? Open access at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... @ispp-pops.bsky.social
- Reposted by Benedek Kurdi👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse. 👩🏻💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiCheck out @theazalabak.bsky.social's cool new paper on model-based planning during foraging. She's applying for grad school this season, so keep your eyes out!
- How do people decide whether to stay with a good thing or leave in search of something better? In her new paper, @theazalabak.bsky.social explores how model-based planning guides foraging decisions in structured environments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- congrats, @ahbailey.bsky.social! 🥳🥳🥳
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiAffective science has lost an extraordinary member of our community: Dr. Paul Ekman, who passed peacefully at home at the age of 91 on Monday. Dr. Ekman's pioneering cross-cultural research on the interpretation of facial expressions in emotional terms...(1)
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiPOSTDOC POSITION in social psychology at Cornell @cornellpsych.bsky.social! We will begin reviewing apps Dec 1st. Please repost! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31185 @spspnews.bsky.social @spspsc.bsky.social @aplssc.bsky.social @spssi.bsky.social @psychscience.bsky.social
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiThe journal's homepage is now live: journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/xphi We will soon also be found under xphi.eu. Accepting submissions in about 2 weeks.
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiHow do we succeed at self-control? In a new paper in @pnas.org with James Wilson, David Kalkstein, and Melissa Ferguson, we use mouse-tracking of ~47,000 decisions of long-term over short-term to show that 'willpower' is too narrow a conception of self-control www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiThere is now a Gen Z slang dplyr and I might use it just so I can have ‘yeet()’ in my code. github.com/hadley/genzp...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiI’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiPeople are lazy--except when they're watching other people work hard. My student Emily Zohar just published her first first-authored paper, and it reveals something surprising about effort and social norms. /1 osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiOuch
- Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiJust 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!
- Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiNew publication: “Reshaping the happy face advantage with reinforcement learning” Happy to share this paper by tjitsvanlent.bsky.social with Rob Holland, Harm Veling, & erikbij.bsky.social. We investigate whether instrumental learning can change biases in emotion recognition tinyurl.com/2s397h34
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiI'm recruiting PhD students for my lab at Northwestern! I'm reviewing applications for the Department of Psychology for the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Clinical areas, due 12/1. 🧠 Come join the CATS Lab: nucatslab.com Learn about our latest research: iamh.northwestern.edu/research/res...
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiBlue III wikiart.org/en/joan-miro/blue-iii
- Reposted by Benedek KurdiPublic health is under attack by a deluge of misinformation. We offer a consensus report from the American Psychological Association summarizing what we know & what interventions are effective in countering it. We provide 8 concrete recommendations. Open-access - awspntest.apa.org/fulltext/202...
