The It's Innate! Podcast - Episodes Tagged with “Social Cognition”

Episode 42: Change starts with believing that things can be different (with Tamar Kushnir)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

What a lovely episode! We began by chatting with Professor Tamar Kushnir about her childhood, her love of math, her academic background, and how she got involved with research in the first place. We then spent some time talking about what it was like training under the world-renowned developmental scientist Alison Gopnik and being surrounded by the likes of Josh Tenenbaum, Dave Sobel, Tom Griffiths, among others. She shares how she dealt with the imposter syndrome that came from that experience but also how working with folks like that was extremely formative for her career.

In the second segment, we turn our focus to one of her recently published papers in Cognition entitled "Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision". That discussion largely focused on how 4- to 8-year-old children believe that others find it is easier to change a weaker belief than a stronger one, but that how all of that depends on the type of belief a person has (e.g., whether the belief moral, social, or factual in nature). Deon and Tamar then have a friendly back-and-forth about whether the findings can be boiled down to associative learning. Tamar makes a convincing case why they cannot (at least entirely).

Links

Li, P. H., Soter, L. K., & Kushnir, T. (2026). Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision. Cognition, 276, 106668. Link Special Guest: Tamar Kushnir.

Episode 41: "Friends / ones (our social cognition) can depend on" (with Ryan Lei)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

In the first half of this episode, Deon chats with Dr. Ryan Lei -- associate professor of psychology at Haverford College -- about his unique (and somewhat fortuitous) academic journey, what life is like as a professor at a Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC), and how SLACs differ from R1s. In the second segment, we talk about his 2020 Psychological Science paper, "The development of intersectional social prototypes", which explored whether children's ability to categorize faces by gender is impacted by the race of those faces.

Plus, we spend quite a bit of time talking about the broader topic of "intersectionality" and "intersectional invisibility" and the implications each has for our everyday lives. And of course, there's lots of talk about mechanism! What a fun, jam-packed episode!

Links

Lei, R. F., Leshin, R. A., & Rhodes, M. (2020). The development of intersectional social prototypes. Psychological Science, 31(8), 911-926. Link Special Guest: Ryan Lei.

Episode 28: Seeing (can help you infer what someone else) is believing (with Sholei Croom)

Deon Benton & Jenny Wang — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

We were delighted to be joined by Sholei Croom, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins working with Chaz Firestone. We open this episode, as always, by chatting about Sholei's journey in science. We then turn to their PNAS paper, "Seeing and Understanding Epistemic Actions" by Croom, Zhou, and Firestone (2023). This paper explores whether third-party observers can infer what other people are trying to learn simply by observing their actions. As we talk about in the episode, this project highlights an underexplored aspect of social perception: human learners can intuit what others are trying to learn simply from their actions.

Links

Croom, S., Zhou, H., & Firestone, C. (2023). Seeing and understanding epistemic actions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(49), e2303162120. Link Special Guest: Sholei Croom.