Some Words are Worth a Thousand Pictures.

This is a growing, alphabetically ordered list of some of my favorite papers/books, and why I think you should read them.

I refer to authors by their first names because differentially using surnames can reinforce power and gender hierarchies – and because science should be a collaborative community.

Cognitive Science - Theory:

• Cushman, F. (2020). Rationalization is rational. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e28. Link
  • People can explain their own behavior. But a lot of clever research has shown that people’s explanations do not always track their behavior. For example, you can get people to explain why they picked one identical dishwasher over another and they’ll make some stuff up. This kind of evidence has long been taken to evidence the shallowness of cognition, and our irrationality. Fiery offers a contradictory account of why our explanations may actually evidence sophisticated learning mechanisms that allow us to understand ourselves. Though there is room for more nuanced mechanisms for meta-reasoning and self-narratives.
• Griffiths, T. L. (2020). Understanding human intelligence through human limitations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(11), 873-883. Link
  • Reasoning is so central to humanity that we named ourselves ‘discerning hominids’ (homo sapiens). How should we understand ourselves, then, if our creations (AI) are more discerning than we are? Tom argues that there is a unique flavor of intelligence that characterizes humans, and that this flavor is characterized by constraints on our time, computation, and communication. I think that this is a much more principled approach to understanding the psyche than generating ad hoc explanations for specific inferences/behavior. Though there are some constraints missing.
• Lombrozo, T. (2006). The structure and function of explanations. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(10), 464-470. Link
  • Is statistical learning all there is to cognition? Tania’s review of explanations points out that explanation plays a unique role in learning, often guiding inference more strongly than mere covariation. This shows how theory-guided, or model-based, higher-order cognition can be. Though there is no attempt at formalizing the kind of evidence that explanation provides.
• Hofstadter, D. R. (1999). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid. Basic books.
  • What does recursion have to do with cognition? What is recursion? What?

Cognitive Science - Empirical:

• Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological science, 17(5), 383-386. Link
  • How much are our most important moral judgments, such as who to kill, governed by evidence vs. bias? Jennifer’s work shows the devastating and often invisible influence of systemic racism, posing deep challenges to deliberative accounts of moral judgment.
• Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928. Link
  • A common pitfall in psychology is to notice the complexity of some behavior, fail to formalize it, and declare it unlearnable as a consequence. Jenny’s work is my favorite demonstration of how efficiently humans can learn from limited data. This raises difficulties for any ‘in principle unlearnable’ account: There is a lot more that can be extracted in our data than it may seem.

Meta-science:

• Almaatouq, A., et al. (2022). Beyond playing 20 questions with nature: Integrative experiment design in the social and behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-55. Link
  • A lot of psychology research doesn’t replicate. Why? In part because our behavior depends on a very large number of variables that are not accounted for in studies. Abdoullah & Co outline a vision for scaling up psychology by systematically manipulating all of the relevant variables. This is a leap forward for improving psychological science. Though many issues remain: How can we power studies testing higher-order interactions? How can smaller, less-well-funded-than-MIT research groups contribute to science? How do we come up with the relevant variables?
• Flake, J. K., & Fried, E. I. (2020). Measurement schmeasurement: Questionable measurement practices and how to avoid them. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(4), 456-465. Link
  • Resolving the conceptual issues above through more measurement seems like a good idea. But Jessica’s work highlights that there are systemic issues with how we pick and choose what counts as a measurement that, if unadressed, could nullify the efforts of big-data-type-science.
• Meehl, P. E. (1990). Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable. Psychological reports, 66(1), 195-244. Link
  • Should we build on prior literature in psychology, as we are taught to, by citing and testing previous accounts? Paul points out 16 (yes, really) reasons why prior research in psychology is more like quicksand than firm footing. Though how to remedy this problem remains an open question.
• Yarkoni, T. (2022). The generalizability crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e1. Link
  • Why is our understanding of psychology so fraught? Tal makes similar observations to Abdoullah and Jessica, but points out a crucial flaw that even massive experiments cannot address: Our rampant tendency to over-generalize our findings. Though how to remedy this problem remains an open question.

Philosophy:

• Hardwig, J. (1985). Epistemic dependence. The Journal of philosophy, 82(7), 335-349. Link
  • People’s understanding seems shallow because the relevant unit for understanding is not individual people, but rather communities. John outlines the web of epistemic dependence that we find ourselves in.
• Kitcher, P. (1990). The division of cognitive labor. The journal of philosophy, 87(1), 5-22. Link
  • How should we allocate our time and effort in science (and elsewhere)? Philip argues that the optimal individual policy for picking what to believe and study is societally suboptimal.
• Godfrey-Smith, P. (2009). Theory and reality: An introduction to the philosophy of science. University of Chicago Press.
  • What is a theory? I’ve observed that many scientists (myself included) don’t have good answers to this question. Reading Peter’s work helped me understand why.