@tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
Tea drinking associate professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialSide note: This project started with an email from Ricky in May 2021 who had just received his BSc in Cognitive Systems at UBC. It took over 5 years with lots of zoom sessions to complete it. Ricky and I still haven't met in person.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialWe share some tips on how to develop better intuition for how observational and experimental data should be combined to make good decisions.
Counterfactual thinking is at the heart of it!
You can try out your own intuitions by playing around with data: cicl-stanford.github.io/good_decisio...
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialWhile both novices and experts make incorrect inferences about the counterfactual types from the data (e.g. believing people benefit from acting when they don't), their decisions systematically follow these (incorrect) inferences.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialPeople's decisions are well-explained by a simple decision model that uses a linear additive combination of the experimental and observational data. But these decisions don't correlate well with the predictions of the normative model.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialPeople leave a lot of money on the table! Getting feedback doesn't improve performance, but engaging with the data more closely helps. Experts at Stanford (postdocs & students in statistics, economics, or data science) performed better than novices but still far from optimally.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialBalke & Pearl (1994) developed a normative model of how to do this. How do people's decisions compare? Not well! People are better than chance but far from optimal. They have difficulty inferring the counterfactual types from the data, relying on a simple linear additive heuristic instead.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialOne should use the data to infer whether someone will benefit from the treatment, be harmed by it, or be unaffected. These are counterfactual notions! Benefit = better because of action. By placing a value on each counterfactual type, one can compute the expected benefit of acting vs. not acting.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialImagine a doctor 👩⚕️ who has data from an RCT and an observational study and needs to decide whether to administer a treatment to a patient. Or a manager 👩💼 who has data from an A/B test and from how people behaved on their own, deciding whether to launch a new ad. How should they use the data?
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialI'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.
@maxkw.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialWe won best paper at the COLM Workshop on Agent Behavior for our paper: AI Assistants Overassist!
Congratulations @veronateo.bsky.social, Raghav Jain and @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social! Check out the preprint arxiv.org/abs/2607.21306
@lauragwilliams.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialdelighted to share my review article, out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! i have been thinking a lot about dynamics lately. this article outlines three key principles - persistence, parallelism, and time-stamped encoding - that support human speech comprehension 🧠✨🌀
@hyogweon.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialJust out in Cognition, with Aaron Chuey & @rbzsparks.bsky.social! Here we ask: What do children infer from watching others communicate?
@tanialombrozo.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialOut today!
@mh-christiansen.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social👉 The Social Tinkering paper with Nick Chater is now out in an issue of BBS. We highlight the importance of bottom-up and socially-oriented factors in cultural evolution 1/4
@talboger.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialWe often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...
@annaleshinskaya.bsky.socialReposted by @tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialI am recruiting graduate students for UCI's PhD in Cognitive Sciences - www.cogsci.uci.edu/graduate/pro... The lab's focus is on how relational structure and combinatorial reasoning is implemented in human brains and large language models--and if they are similar.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialAmazing!! Huge congratulations @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant' 🥳🎉
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialI'm so grateful for the continued support from my lab, and for everyone who helped along the way, now as an associate professor with tenure at Stanford 🧑🏫🥂🌲
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialExcited and grateful to be part of this initiative by the Toyota Research Institute 🙏
Together with Thomas Icard, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social, and @yangxiang.bsky.social our team will explore what role responsibility plays in supporting effective collaboration.
@tobigerstenberg.bsky.socialThe 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...
