About

Joachim Krueger received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1988, where he had a glorious experience. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin before coming to Brown University in 1991. His research focuses on social judgment and decision-making, including topics such as self-perception, strategic interpersonal behavior, and intergroup relations. He studies the intersections of cognitive-social psychology with behavioral economics and organizational behavior, with recurring themes of interpersonal trust, power, and leadership in his research and teaching. Krueger is on the Editorial Boards of the Personality and Social Psychology Review and the American Journal of Psychology. When not engaged in positivist approaches, he explores questions of creativity and happiness, topics he writes about on his blog. He teaches courses such as CLPS1730 Psychology, Business, Economics at Brown University. His academic interests and contributions center around understanding higher-level cognition and social psychology phenomena.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Psychology
• Statistics
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Projection Underlies Both Ingroup Favoritism and Subjective Growth

  2026-03-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Inductive Reasoning Model (Krueger et al., 2024a; Krueger et al., 2024b) describes how differential projection generates several known patterns in the perception of groups including ingroup favoritism. Extending the model to temporal self-perception, we predicted that much like people project more strongly to ingroups than to outgroups they will also project more strongly to their future self than to their past self. Using self-ratings of pseudowords, we predicted that this differential projection would produce ingroup favoritism and subjective growth. Results of a preregistered online experiment (N = 300) with a minimal group manipulation were in line with these predictions. Separating the unique effects of projection and social desirability, we find that people actively enhance their ingroups and their future selves, beyond the levels that can be expected based on differential projection. We discuss implications for understanding the relationship between social and temporal perception.

  PublisherDOI

• Free Will: Reality and Perception

  Qeios · 2026-01-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The debate on free will in psychology has moved beyond the question of whether libertarian free will can exist in a world governed by necessity and chance (i.e., causal determinism and uncertainty). There is much interest in the question of whether the belief in free will is good for the believer or the community. The first part of this perspective paper defends the claim that libertarian free will does not, and indeed cannot, exist. The second part argues that compatibilism does not help but rather hinders scientific progress. Likewise, the epistemology of pragmatism misconstrues questions of reality, perception, and predictive accuracy. The third part reviews empirical findings showing that the belief in free will, though false, can be useful to believers in that it can elevate self-perception and the readiness to interact with others assumed to believe in free will.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inside Front Cover: Chemical Process Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Europe: Insights and Perspectives from Industry Scientists (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 19/2025)

  Angewandte Chemie International Edition · 2025-03-27

  paratextOpen access1st author

  Chemical Process Development of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) is a critical task in the pharmaceutical industry. The cover artwork illustrates the scale-up pathway from lab scale via microreactors to pilot scale reactors. In a clockwise arrangement, it highlights key drivers for process development (speed, sustainability, cost, global networks, digitalization and people) as well as selected API modalities (radiotherapeutics, small molecules, oligonucleotides and antibody drug conjugates). Read more in the Scientific Perspective by Ulrich Scholz, Carl Friedrich Nising et al. (e202420719).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Inductive Reasoning Model of Diachronic Self-Perception

  2025-07-24

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  How do people perceive their selves across time? Two distinctive empirical patterns have been documented. People perceive greater similarity with their future self than with their past self (i.e., the so-called ‘end-of-history illusion’), while also expecting to become a better version of themselves in the future than they were in the past (i.e., subjective growth). How may these two patterns be reconciled? We extend the inductive reasoning model (IRM; Krueger et al., 2024-a, 2024-b) from social perception to diachronic self-perception to propose a resolution. Conceptualizing the end-of-history pattern as differential projection to the future (stronger) versus the past (weaker), we derive and predict subjective growth inasmuch as self-images are positive. We present evidence from a series of re-analyses of diachronic self-ratings (total N = 8,544) and a preregistered original study (N = 505). We discuss the power of the IRM to generate precise, non-trivial, predictions and to integrate seemingly contradictory phenomena in self- and social perception.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiation Games

  The American Journal of Psychology · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Negotiation is serious business. The term comes from the Latin phrase denoting the negation (neg) of leisure (otium). Negotiation is hard work and must be taken seriously. The contemporary culture surrounding the study and practice of negotiation is rich and diverse, with coaches, gurus, and “specialists” crowding the field. Some of the most successful negotiators have become stars in the eyes of deep-pocketed businesses and an adoring public. To negotiate well is to get what you want while perhaps also benefiting others or society at large. Good negotiation stories are retold; failures are forgotten.The public is spellbound because tales of negotiation are relatable. Brother Sasha is on to something when he claims that human communication is essentially a matter of negotiation (see epigraph), perhaps not all the time but often enough to intrigue us. In a culture that rewards heroes, most academic negotiation researchers toil in anonymity. However, some manage to do it all: conduct basic and applied research, teach negotiators in the making, and coach captains of industry. Max Bazerman of the Harvard Business School is one of the deans—not to say godfathers—in this world. His is a household name, and yet, in Negotiation: The Game Has Changed, he begins in good Aristotelian manner by establishing his ethos, describing his credentials to entice us to be receptive to his message. Here, Bazerman engages in a one-sided negotiation so that we may read, understand, and recommend his work.The book's subtitle, The Game Has Changed, is smart; it does three things. By using the word “game,” it refers to both formal game theory and the ordinary, playful side of the serious business of negotiation. By using the predicate “has changed,” it invites the reader to expect a transformative text. After reading this book—we are encouraged to think—we will understand the new rules, have the tools to master them, and enjoy improved prospects in life and work.For the most part, Negotiation delivers on the promise. The key change we need to understand, Bazerman suggests, is that the game has become more complex and complicated. One reason for this is the increased globalization of the last few decades, which requires negotiators to acquire cross-cultural competences. Another reason is the ongoing technological revolution, which continues to create new opportunities to communicate while also placing new constraints on channel richness. The face-to-face encounters that dominated and shaped human communication from the Pleistocene to the 20th century are now just one format among many. To illustrate the point, enjoy the scene from The Sopranos, season 1, episode 6, where Uncle Junior and Hesh do a split-pie negotiation over the “back taxes” Hesh owes Junior, the boss. They end up splitting the difference, but the nonverbals as well as the mediation attempts by Tony and Johnny Sack reveal that a richer context, fed by their relationship history, is in play. At the end, Junior appears to concede with a funny racial remark while saving face (TonySopranoYT, n.d. 1:25).The current that rushes the game of negotiation toward greater complexity challenges not only the practitioner but also the theoretician and researcher. Science by necessity abstracts in order to generalize. Inductive power, that is, successful learning and prediction, requires cases to be lumped into reasonable categories. The cliché that everyone (i.e., each case of negotiation) is different is nihilistic because it suggests that the past, however rich it seems to be in memory, is useless in our quest to learn from it and do better moving forward.Empirical sciences, such as psychology, seek to cope with the proliferation of complexity by admitting moderator variables. Adding just one more moderator, such as the popular distinction between individualist and collectivist cultures, may improve the predictability of events within each subcategory, but it gradually washes away the big story, if there is one (Krueger et al., 2024). If the growth of moderators continues unchecked, complexity is modeled with complexity until the map of the world is as large as the world itself. To use an example from the negotiation literature, suppose that starting off with a high demand in order to anchor the process of agreement-seeking works well among strangers, but it can backfire with friends, who will be insulted. The recognition of this contingency seems innocent enough, until we worry that we need to make further distinctions to recognize the channel of communication (face-to-face vs. audio only), the political climate, the likelihood of future interaction, the presence versus absence of affected third parties, information (a)symmetries, individual negotiators versus teams, alternatives to fall back on, and what have you. It is Ptolemy's revenge on Galileo.Whereas the lab scientist can hold all but one factor constant to cleanly study individual effects, practitioners play a different game. They need not worry about the elegance and inductive power of theory and evidence-based formal models. They want help with the challenges they face on their job. All of the researched factors potentially matter, but when there are many such factors, the theoretician–researcher cannot say whether the findings of all the individual one-factor studies can be added up because no one knows whether there might not be higher-order interactions too numerous and too intricate to be understood at once. Bazerman notes that his students and clients push back, asking him how his science applies to whatever specific negotiation challenge looms in their recent experience. Clients want to be coached, and students want to be given actionable skills. Bazerman deserves credit for his efforts to bring the science to the practitioners without surrendering to their demand (at least not in the classroom) to tailor each and every analysis to someone's specific case.In Negotiation, Bazerman harnesses the wild beast of consequential human interaction by highlighting two lessons that transcend the daunting diversity of real-world cases. At the structural level, he urges negotiators to search for ways to “enlarge the pie.” This phrase, he explains, is more apt than the popular term “win–win” because it highlights the process; it tells negotiators what they need to do in order to obtain favorable outcomes. At the psychological level, Bazerman warns that hard work lies ahead. Negotiators must abstain from snap judgments and do their due diligence to prepare; they must seek to understand the other party's perspective, including their experience, preferences, and information; and they must—and this might seem surprising—understand their own experience (or lack thereof), preferences, and information.This is a tall order. Those who have followed Bazerman's work know that his ideas are in close alignment with the dual-system framework of cognitive science. In that framework, the intuitive System 1 receives an appreciative nod for its efficiency and evolutionary adaptiveness, but the judgmental heuristics it uses are faulted for any errors and irrationalities that creep in. The deliberative System 2 receives the credit for settings things right—if it manages to do so. When System 2 does not succeed in its reparative work, advocates of the dual-systems framework demand more cognitive work. If there is still failure at the end of the road, we know whom to blame.The first order of business for the negotiator is to know thyself. They must be clear on their preferences and interests, the alternatives they have should negotiation fail, and the limitations of their own rational and emotional minds (e.g., how liable they are to get angry when faced with an unreasonable or hostile counterpart and how they might cope with their own reactive impulses). Homework and self-reflection can help—to a point. Take, for example, the reservation price, a stock concept in negotiation. As a buyer, what is the most you would pay; as a seller, what is the least amount you would accept? In the formal literature, it is taken for granted that negotiators know their reservation prices, and given this assumption, quantitative modeling has a rock to stand on. The sobering psychological truth is that reservation prices are often elastic; they float with a changing context. Bazerman wonders what it must be like to bargain with a Moroccan carpet merchant when you don't know the true value of a rug or how much you might reasonably willing to spend on it.The absence of a rock-hard reservation price is not necessarily a bad thing; it gives the negotiator room to adapt to a fluid situation. Care must be taken to not be exploited by a ruthless opponent, of course. Sometimes, one's reservation price can be known, but often it is a matter of estimation and judgment under uncertainty. When negotiating with the carpet merchant in Fes, for example, I came to realize how little I knew about a rug's value to me or to anyone, but I understood that the seller was treating me to an education on rug trading in the land of the Berber. In the end, I found satisfaction in the thought that I had paid not only for the physical rug but also for an enjoyable if intangible experience (Krueger, 2012).When crucial elements of self-knowledge are uncertain or in flux, judgmental heuristics can be valuable. They succeed where spreadsheets fail (Gigerenzer et al., 2022; Krueger et al., 2020). Practitioners should be encouraged to build a toolbox of heuristics they can tap into when the due diligence approach fails to yield serviceable insights, when there is reason to suspect that other, hard-to-quantify, considerations are in play, or when a case of negotiation becomes so complex that aggregating relevant evidence raises the specter of overfitting the model.Bazerman briefly acknowledges the salutary role of heuristics, as when he references Messick's (1993) observation that splitting the difference (in contrast to Voss's, 2016, famous refusal) is, under the right circumstances, a sign of social intelligence. If, God forbid, you overpay once, the norm of reciprocity will make it likely that the other party will later return the favor. Twenty-four centuries ago, Xenophon was hip to the power of engineered indebtedness. In his essay on the education of Cyrus the Great, he notes, “You can create huge benefits by creating debts of gratitude” (as rendered by Hedrick, 2006, p. 117). If the norm of reciprocity fails, one can still walk away—or send in the hoplites to set the opponent straight.When it comes to reading one's counterpart's mind, perspective taking reveals itself as an archetypal challenge under social uncertainty. Lacking direct access to the other's mind, and worrying their talk may be cheap, simulating their mind by using one's own mind as an anchor is a heuristic place to start (Krueger, 2000). Ask yourself what you would do if you were negotiating with yourself. Social projection may not deliver 20/20 vision, but it does reduce social perceptual myopia.Negotiation shines most brightly when Bazerman deconstructs received game-theoretic wisdom, which is blind to social heuristics and dynamics, and the willingness of reasonable people to find ways to cooperate to mutual benefit. The main lesson taught by the famous ultimatum game, for example, is that sane people reject lousy deals. Although this delivers a lose–lose outcome in the short run, it sets the stage for mutually profitable exchanges in the long run. A little moral outrage can turn short-term irrationality into long-term reasonableness (Avrahami et al., 2013).Bazerman's finest example of reasonable information sharing outperforming the blind application of dominating strategies comes from his early collaborative work. Game theory claims that the ready acceptance of an offer signals overpayment. However, Valley et al. (1998) showed theoretically and empirically that cooperative negotiators find a positive bargaining zone where both buyer and seller benefit. Other examples of changes in the negotiation game involve multiple offers and contingent contracts, all of which increase flexibility, encourage the flow of information, and make Pareto-efficient solutions more probable.Bazerman strives to make everyone happy, and he brooks no unethical business practices. Yet in Negotiation, he leaves us with a sense of unease regarding the practitioner's obligations. Students have pressed him on how to deal with opponents who are hostile, who refuse to engage with an improved game, or who are just too dumb to see the benefits. In response, Bazerman prizes “wisdom,” a term that, alas, has lost little of its vagueness since the times of Socrates.The final sections of Negotiation are conventional, reviewing the influence techniques cataloged by Robert Cialdini and some of the nudges popularized by Thaler and Sunstein. As to Cialdini (2008), he has struggled with the question of how to use influence techniques ethically when they are, arguably, tools of manipulation. Thaler and Sunstein (2021) are less troubled by such qualms, cheerfully overlooking the patent contradiction between the “paternalist” and the “libertarian.” Bazerman seems to share their optimism when endorsing nudging. Critically, however, there are alternatives. With “boosting,” humans are taught to think like grown-ups and reach their own considered conclusions (Herzog & Hertwig, 2025). Nudging is oversold. Like its promoters, Bazerman notes how opt-in defaults yield longer lists of organ donors than do opt-out defaults. The question, though, is how many lives these defaults save. Not so many, as it turns out (Dallacker et al., 2024).Despite some limitations, Negotiation is a timely and useful book. The game has changed, though perhaps not as much as readers are invited to think. The second half of the book reads rather like a review of the known. As Bazerman is fond of appealing to wisdom, we should not be surprised that some of its pearls were found years ago, as, for example, by Xenophon. Failing to negotiate well is costly. Consider the Iliad (Mitchell, 2011). Why was Achilles so enraged (as in the epigraph: “Tell me, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus”)? Agamemnon, the Greek overlord, had pulled rank and claimed the sexy slave girl Achilles had captured and wanted to keep for himself. The two men argue, but they do not negotiate. Could they not have enlarged the pie, pushing toward the Pareto-efficient frontier? In Bazerman's world, Agamemnon might have left pretty Briseis in Achilles’ hands, in return for Achilles’ willingness to lead the charge against Troy. Much bloodshed could have been avoided, but we would have missed out on some great poetry. So who won?

  PublisherDOI

• The Search for the Well-Tempered Soul

  The American Journal of Psychology · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As my elder daughter and I were heading toward the woods for a walk, I meekly apologized that I was, for reasons beyond my introspective access, in a low mood. My daughter recommended a mood shift so that we might enjoy our time together. Perhaps this was, as she might put it, “a download from the universe,” since by chance (chance!?) I had just started reading Ethan Kross's Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. I feel good about this review assignment because even though I have not studied human affect beyond its cognitive manifestations (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2003), I can claim some street cred on the matter, having co-taught a lecture course on “The Psychology and Philosophy of Happiness” (Krueger, 2016), and having attended, with mixed feelings, the first conference on positive psychology in Akumal in the Yucatán in 1999.The question raised in Shift has been nagging at humanity since the dawn of self-consciousness. As self-conscious creatures, we humans have evolved a susceptibility to the idea—the illusion—that we have (or “are”) a fragile ego hosted by a body running multiple self-regulatory systems, with most of its operations being unknowable, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable (Goel, 2022; Krueger et al., 2017). Our emotions, and other types of affect such as moods, are the body's way of telling us—the ego—that something important is going on and that we may want to act in order to survive. Although emotions speak a crystal-clear language, they also have their own opacity. We know when they demand to be felt, yet we often struggle to fully understand just what exactly they want from us. Are they well calibrated to our living needs, and if not, how might we moderate them? In Shift, Ethan Kross lays out an evidence-based roadmap to illuminate the opportunities and limitations of self-regulation. The presented evidential base is of high quality and up to date, and its delivery is enhanced by engaging, if lengthy, anecdotes.The quest for a well-tempered soul can be understood as a dialectic play between two principles, the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Nietzsche, 1872). If we lean too far into the former, we will find ourselves reduced to a kind of Mr. Spock; if we lean too far into the latter, we drown in our own intoxication. That said, with its quest for the well-tempered soul, Shift's mission is largely Apollonian—perhaps meta-Apollonian in the sense that it aims for the two gods to be living together harmoniously in the human mind. Thus, the Delphic advice of “nothing in excess” does not quite hit the mark. A person who never experiences strong emotions would be stunted. Kross tells the poignant story of his grandmother, who survived the horrors of genocide, raised a family, built a community, and flourished deep into old age. Where many victims were lastingly traumatized, this tough and wise woman found a way to manage her emotional life by neither suppressing her sorrow and grief nor allowing it to overwhelm her. The management tool that worked for her was to set aside certain times, such as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, to experience and share her sorrow. Although this may sound like an overly cerebral solution (“I will cry on the 27th of Nisan”), we can imagine that this strategy works well if it is practiced (which is one of Shift's key recommendations) and if it is supported by social norms and expectations.The three major ecological properties of emotional expression are frequency, intensity, and duration, and the first is a question of balance. Let us emote, but not too often and not too rarely! The second property may submit to the Delphic advice to not overdo anything. However, any answer to the question of intensity depends on the emotion's frequency. If grandma leans into her sorrow once a year, she can emote more strongly than if the emotion were scheduled for every Monday morning. As to duration, the situation is simpler in that a healthy organism's emotional episodes are brief, with a sudden onset, an early spike, and a tapering dénouement. It is the lasting negative emotional states that require therapeutic interventions, and these lie beyond Shift's purview.Shift focuses on everyday opportunities for reasonably healthy people to move their emotions and moods away from the negative and toward the positive while not losing sight of the signal function so characteristic of evolved emotional systems. The narrative progresses conventionally from the proximal and specific to the distal and general. Closest to home lies managing the sensory input, followed by directing attention, shifting perspective and interpretation, shaping the space that surrounds us, deftly using the presence of other people, and finally, respecting and navigating the wily currents of the cultural context.A few examples illustrate this progression. As to sensory input, play some of your favorite music to lift the emotional boat (it need not be Journey), or better yet, go into Nature for she will hit multiple senses all at once. As to attentional selection and processing, make creative use of distractors without seeking outright or long-term avoidance of triggering stimuli. At the positive end of the emotional spectrum, cultivate the art of savoring (not elaborated in Shift, but see Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013) so that even when you fall off a cliff, you can still marvel at the beauty of the flowers clinging to the crags (it's a Zen thing). As to perspective changing, put some distance between yourself and what appears to be happening to you. One way to do this is to imagine what advice you'd give to someone else in the situation you yourself are in right now.Another way to create distance is to physically locomote. Given the resources, we can vote with our feet. The Irish did that after the potato blight, and Professor Santos escaped from Yale University after burning out from teaching a massive course on happiness. It is easy to see how such zooming out (literally, in this case) is a confounded affair and that firm conclusions must remain elusive. If the Santos story is to be probative, we should be interested to know whether the good professor recovered from her crisis, and if she did, to what extent the improvement was due to the retreat to Cambridge per se and not just a restored life–work balance. Shift stays away, just barely, from the corny idea of finding your “happy place.” We all know that we can never go home again, but we can go to Cozumel or Coney Island. It matters that the destination offers natural beauty, but perhaps the decisive element is psychological distance—that recognition that the place is not “here.” Even Cambridge, Massachusetts, might do.There is a common core of distance finding and the perspective shift discussed above. But even if you stay put, we are told, you can modify your situation by removing triggers of desire and its attendant emotions, as the author reportedly does when he sends his dinner guests home with doggie bags of half-eaten pizza, thereby putting distance between himself and the carboniferous treat. This tactic refers back to the idea of controlling one's sensory input. Incidentally, it should be made clear that this sort of sensation control does not constitute self-binding, as the latter admits sensation while blocking the behavioral response (Elster, 2000).Shift then covers some well-trodden territory of human sociality. Since the days of Allport the Elder (Allport, 1924), we have learned much about the ease with which emotions—and particularly negative ones—travel from one person to the next (Kelly et al., 2016). Emotional contagion is adaptive as it underwrites group cohesion and cooperation. Thanks to its automaticity, contagion is difficult to regulate. It comes in handy, though, when in times of emotional trouble one seeks social support and empathy. Venting to and gossiping about others are crude but useful heuristics when looking for a shift; they bring relief but risk alienating third parties, such as the targets of gossip. Shift cautions that emotional sharing is but a first step. The second step is to sit back (distance!) and consider what creative solutions are available so that the person can move on.The zooming journey ends—though it does not culminate—with comments on culture. This is a rather weak section, for what can be said about a person's emotional self-regulation at the cultural level? Sure, local culture is the water in which we human fish swim, and cultural assumptions rarely break into consciousness; it might take a physical move, be it from a shtetl to Brooklyn or from New Bedford to New Haven, but migration does not guarantee happiness. Well-being tends to be lower among immigrants than among the residents of the host location (Arpino & De Valk, 2017). Yet immigrants tend to have greater self-concept clarity, which is something to feel good about (Adam et al., 2018). Shift touches on this point when discussing the potentially beneficent role of social comparisons. Such comparisons need not be downers if the comparer knows what lessons to learn from the comparisons’ outcomes. This is as true at the interindividual as it is at the intercultural level.Shift is more about local culture than it is about grand sweeps, such as the tired distinction between individualism and collectivism. Seekers of emotional self-regulation are advised to develop their own routines and rituals, advice that jibes with the general tenet that regulatory if–then rules must be well practiced in order to work. Lastly, there is the general point that cultural competence and embeddedness encourage compliance, conformity, and cooperation. This is good and well, but it dodges the question of what people need to do to stand out, rebel, and self-actualize, that is, to be free (Krueger, “La Vie en Révolte,” this issue).Shift concludes with a return to the theme that self-regulation, at its best, is routinized. Having become automatic, self-regulation liberates attention and working memory to focus on more interesting things at hand. “The goal is,” Kross observes, “to be able to shift your emotions easily and effortlessly—almost habitually, the way you buckle your seat belt without even thinking” (p. 201). One way to get there, he suggests, is to follow Oettingen's WOOP scheme by visualizing what you Want, visualizing the desired Outcome, visualizing potential Obstacles, and Planning accordingly. Kross seems to realize that this is a hyperrational way of thinking about human action and that it is applicable only to standardized, recurring, and foreseeable situations. Emotions often take us by surprise, however, which is their way of frustrating the rationalist's best efforts to stay in charge. As to WOOP, there are reasons to leave the champagne bottle corked. In a meta-analysis, Wang et al. (2021) found a positive effect of about g = .3 but also of evidence of publication bias. The two largest studies produced very small effects: g = .09 with N = 9,619 and g = .06 with N = 4,290. Self-regulators in the wild may wish for stronger medicine.It is unfortunate that Shift fails to transcend the traditional dualist frame, where a conscious ego-self seeks to harness an autonomous emotion-self. Success in self-regulation is still sought in the victory of the ego, as expressed in the book title's byline. If we take this dualism seriously and accept the image of two battling selves, we should not be blind to the emotional self's creative ways to fight back. Everyone is familiar with the experience of conscientiously following self-help advice (ever since Smiles, 1859) only to find that affect asserts its interests just when the ego is poised to declare its own supremacy. Shift acknowledges this dynamic in the context of affect suppression, but it seems likely that the same dynamic extends to any and perhaps all attempts to tame the passions with reason. Moving away from the ego-as-master narrative as David Hume famously counseled (see epigraph), life may be best lived—and enjoyed—in the interplay of the two self-systems. Let us follow the ancient Greeks, who knew that both Apollo and Dionysos demand their due.

  PublisherDOI

• Heuristic trust

  2025-03-31

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Interpersonal trust requires decisions under uncertainty (not risk!) as the probability of the other person reciprocating is unknown and can only be approached with rough estimates. It is difficult, if not impossible, to optimize trust decisions in rigorous and coherent ways. A suite of social heuristics is the trustors’ best means to achieve a satisfactory solution. We review the findings of a recent research program on bounded rationality in the trust game. We identify a set of social heuristics people can (or should) use when deciding whether to trust. Among these heuristics are social projection, social distance, all-or-nothing, and attention to the general normative environment. We present new empirical findings showing how people might choose whether to submit to different types of dictators in the eponymous game.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nexed

  The American Journal of Psychology · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Most academic disciplines provide some sort of unique fantasy to their practitioners. Many philosophers seek to be virtuous, psychologists to be rational (and both aspire to be happy), and historians to predict the future. In each case, these academics wish to go beyond what their discipline legitimately allows. Sometimes this works, or at least it seems to work well enough, so that this sort of intellectual self-gratification is unlikely to die out.Y. N. Harari is a historian who found fame with his magnum opus Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Although such a project might be said to toy with grandiosity, it certainly teaches some important lessons, as do other works of this genre, such as Graeber and Wengrow's (2023) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Whereas Graeber and Wengrow's strategy is to make the reader question everything they thought they knew, Harari's strategy is to find patterns, tell stories, imagine dystopian outcomes, and to call for self-reflection and wisdom. In his new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, Harari acts much like generative artificial intelligence would (Hofstadter, 1995). Yet imagining sinister outcomes and calling for a human awakening and self-reform, he also casts himself in the role of a prophet in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible. The people have sinned by adoring false gods, he calls out. Unless they turn to the one true God (He who represents rationality, sanity, moderation, self-correction), they will be doomed.Harari seems a bit surprised by his global fame, and he is sensitive to the irony of being considered a thought leader on AI when he is merely a country historian. What makes his work so compelling? For one, Harari is a knowledgeable historian and a gifted storyteller. His narrative shows that he was enjoying himself writing it, so much so that the book is overwritten in parts, when Harari gets carried away with the joy of telling his tale. A work shortened by about 30% might have been just as effective. The main reason for the book's appeal, though, is the deft deployment of historical analogies, which, when heaped up one on top of the other, bring a pattern into focus. Time and again, Harari reports, humans have enhanced existing information networks or created entirely new ones: from the dawn of all-purpose languages to written scripts to telecommunication to the computer and now to the inevitable AI. Many of these revolutions of networked information happened independently in more than one place, which suggests they were “in the air.” It points to a deterministic causal ground and thereby questions the idea that humans could have acted differently. Nonetheless, Harari pleads with humanity to preserve and cultivate self-correcting institutions and practices—as still exist in science and in some well-tempered democracies—in order to avert the damages wrought by runaway technologies, technologies that threaten not only to become an alien and uncontrollable intelligence but also to dominate an enslaved humanity. Indeed, evidence for this development can readily be seen in the morning paper or the click on the news app. Nexus is written to offer a fluent and fluid reading experience. Observers from Aristotle to Unkelbach (2006) have found that the experience of easy perception puts a few hedons in your account (i.e., it feels good), but it also poses the risk of overestimating your comprehension of the material.By going beyond the historical record, Nexus raises the question of whether the flirtation with historicism goes too far. Historicism, Popper (1957) taught, is fatally flawed by its assumption that the study of history can reveal patterns that in turn reveal underlying laws of development. Once these laws are understood—per historicism—the future can be forecast and its arrival can be hastened. This error of false insight and fallacious agency was made by Hegel, and it was taken to tragic conclusions by Marx and his acolytes. Unlike Marx, however, Harari urges not the hastening of an inevitable future but the taming of an evitable one. As with Marx and other historicists, this is all meant to be in the interest of human welfare.What protects Harari's message from devolving into mere storytelling? The key operative concepts are information (and information networks) and intelligence. As to information, the reader looks in vain for a crisp definition. Harari dedicates Chapter 1 to laying the conceptual groundwork. He rejects the “naïve view” that information consists of symbols that represent reality and nothing else. He broadens the scope for information to include anything that can facilitate collective cognition by way of an acceptance of shared meaning (“order”). Stories and myths are information thanks to their intersubjectively achieved validity. They help hold a group or society together, and they enable further information to flow without having to internally represent anything existing externally. Before the advent of AI, state and institutional bureaucracies have been the principal bearers of rationalized mythologies. They bring order with the consent of those who are being ordered.The danger of this conceptual expansion lies in its looseness. Harari misses the opportunity to explain when data are no longer information. Because much depends on patterns and thus multiple data points, it is interesting to see how the arrival of a single pigeon in the fog of World War I is information about the enemy's intentions. The soldiers who received the pigeon knew enough to understand what it meant. They constructed meaning from background knowledge. The pigeon was just one piece of a puzzle, albeit a decisive one. The pigeon story is instructive with regard to both native and artificial intelligence. Human perception is “theoretical” in the sense that it is constitutes a “way of seeing,” a way that is shaped by memories, expectations, and desires (Felin & Holweg, 2024; Felin et al., 2021). Without the perceiver's input, a pigeon is just a pigeon and a cigar is just a cigar.Human perception is not always stable. The Necker cube and the duck–rabbit figure show that reality is not just received but co-created by the viewer (Attneave, 1971). Every good joke is a multistable figure; the experience of the perceptual flip makes us laugh. Consider the title of this review. Why might it make you smile? Because you see, I propose, the multiple allusions from Nexed to Next (as in prediction), to H. Miller's novel Nexus, to the colloquialism Nixed (as in cancellation). It is an informative title because it does not commit to one meaning. Perhaps AI will soon be able to appreciate a good quip, or at least credibly pretend that it can. Meanwhile, the psychological glory of information is that it is underdetermined. To come into bloom, it requires a receptive and sensitive mind. Harari could have made a better case for the role of information in the ongoing AI revolution had he defined it more clearly. What is lacking is a criterion of demarcation. When are data mere data but not information?Some classic theories of information are overlooked, or their implications for Harari's story are not probed. Shannon's (1948) theory remains an important guidepost today. Information is here conceptualized as the complement of uncertainty. A fair coin allows no advantageous betting; the more biased a coin is, the more certain is a win. This view is related to the concepts of entropy, noise, and unpredictability. An information gain results from any reduction in uncertainty. Parenthetically, we may consider the possibility that any change in uncertainty can be regarded as an information gain. To take a psychological example, it used to be thought that ordinary residents of New Haven could not be brought to electrocute a fellow citizen. When Milgram found that 60% of participants were willing to deliver lethal shocks, the old certainty was gone. Human behavior had become less, not more, predictable (Krueger & Massey, 2009). Yet we learned something, just as we did when contemplating this review's title.Creating and appreciating humor and wit is the mark of intelligence, the other key concept in play. Can AI do that? Perhaps it can, though without feeling. One of the cornerstones of Harari's exposition is referring to AI as an alien form of intelligence. AI is alien in that it is not like human intelligence in its inefficiency (energy and coolant consumption) and use of brute force processing (the need for massive training data), and it is intelligent by virtue of being an agent, a form or unity that makes decisions. Its decision making may be without self-consciousness, intention, reflection, or affect, but at the output level what AI does can look like intelligent behavior. It can beat a Go master, for example. Victories like that make AI look agentic.As with his incomplete definition of the concept of information, Harari again leaves readers wondering what to make of the concepts of “intelligence” and “agency.” To say that we all know what we mean is to beg the question. The two concepts seem tightly connected, one perhaps even entailing the other. The very term “AI” claims that intelligence has been achieved, not just a clever simulation thereof. But let's remember Douglas Hofstadter, the godfather of the term “AI” and a student of anthills. Consciousness arises, Hofstadter (1979) held, from the massive, distributed, but individually simple activity of neurons. The neurons are to the brain what the ants are to their hill. Although anthills and AI networks may lack consciousness, the latter can look like intelligent agents. Nature offers many examples of apparent intelligence. Sparrow murmuration is regarded as a type of swarm intelligence where the agents are the individual sparrows acting on simple rules (e.g., follow the sparrow ahead of you and leave a little distance) without knowing what the whole does or what the whole looks like to a sentient observer. If such natural phenomena are models for algorithms, aren't they subject to the same limitations (Chakraborty & Kar, 2017)? What does it mean to say that a computerized information network possesses intelligent agency?As to the consequences of the AI revolution, Harari admits to stressing the dystopia over the utopia. AI networks might spell the collapse of civilization and humanity at large, unless we wise up, that is. Others, perhaps in an effort to allay dystopic fears, have made a sport of showing how AI can be fooled. To name three examples, Gigerenzer (2022; reviewed in Krueger, 2024) notes that, being parasitically dependent on the data of the past, AI consumes exorbitant amounts of energy and cooling water to achieve brute force optimization. This works well in stable environments, but it is easily derailed by unpredictable change or deliberate mischief. Smith (2025), inspired by Hofstadter, reports that ChatGPT is so dumb, it doesn't understand that the game of chess would not change one bit if the bishop and the knight were to trade places and their permissible moves. Wagner et al. (2025) finds that ChatGPT is culturally inept, not having mastered the simple and commonsensical rules of good-faith communication laid out by Grice (1975).Since the scientific community has not figured out what thinking really is, it continually seeks refuge in analogy and metaphor (Krueger, 2007). The cognitive revolution cast the human mind/brain as a computer; now the AI revolutionaries want us to believe that artificial thinking will soon surpass native thinking on all tasks that matter, at which point the study of psychology might be declared moot were if not for a final trump card: How do we do it all with so much less energy and coolant? Meanwhile, the efforts of those who point to AI's embarrassing or amusing failures are Nietzschean projects. If to Nietzsche God was being squeezed into an ever-shrinking metaphysical gap by the advances of science, so has human intelligence become an intelligence of the gaps, now being defined by whatever the machines cannot do. Pragmatic and fluid types of intelligence still favor humans, but for how long?To boost his claim that information is the one decisive currency of the game, Harari notes en passant that some physicists now entertain the notion that information, not energy or matter, is the ground of the universe. Intriguing as this idea may be, it is probably metaphysical nonsense. There may be data at the ground of the universe, but there is no information unless a sentient perceiver takes a peek in search of meaning (recall the pigeon). If information is the stuff of the universe, who is the observer? Oh wait . . . Like all reviews, this commentary is a partial response to the author's work. Nexus might be regarded a postmodern product, floating, indeterminate, rich in hints and possibilities. Some readers may prefer firmer ground. Still, Nexus is thought-provoking in a way AI has not managed to be.

  PublisherDOI

• The False Belief in Free Will

  2025-03-18 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The case against libertarian (i.e., radical) free will could have been closed in 1654 when Thomas Hobbes refuted Bishop Bramhall’s loosely-woven and theology-infused claims. Many distinguished philosophers and scientists have followed Hobbes, although some continue to defend free will libertarianism. Most laypeople believe in free will without achieving conceptual clarity, and so do, surprisingly, many experimental psychologists. We present the case against free will yet again, seeking to reinforce the familiar arguments with fresh ideas and psychological contents. We then consider contemporary measurement issues and entertain some what-if questions. We conclude that any fear of a determined will is unfounded. If people realized that the doctrine of free will is in fact more frightening than the doctrine of determinism, some minds might be swayed. We remain guardedly pessimistic in this regard.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of: "The Guessing Game and Its Implications for Sport Psychology Research — A Tale of Lotteries, Penalties, Mixed Strategies, and Nash Equilibria"

  2025-02-18

  peer-reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A true gentleman, even if he loses his entire fortune, must not show emotion.Money is supposed to be so far beneath a gentleman

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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• David Joachim Grüning

  231 shared

• Patrick R. Heck

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• Kathrin Jander

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• Peter Fischer

  TU Dresden

  26 shared

• Anthony M. Evans

  24 shared

• Theresa E. DiDonato

  Loyola University Maryland

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• Klaus Fiedler

  Heidelberg University

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• Johannes Ullrich

  University of Zurich

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Education

• PhD, Psychology

  University of Oregon

  2030