Rebecca Saxe
Biographic Data
| ID | 1465489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Saxe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Saxe |
| SIGNATURE | SAXE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2377-1791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Expectations of Reciprocal Generosity Are Specific to Equal Relationships
When someone acts generously, what expectations does this create? Classic theories and experiments emphasize reciprocity: the idea that generosity will be returned by the recipient. Yet daily-life and ethnographic observations often show a different pattern: generosity sets a precedent, leading people to expect the same person to be generous again. Across six online behavioral experiments (total N = 599 U.S. adults) using third-party vignette jud…
Support for open science is equally high in opt-in versus representative samples of scientists from a research-focused US university
Many studies on open science attitudes and practice use opt-in samples. This strategy poses a problem: It is unclear whether and to what degree scholars who opt in to surveys about open science are more likely to support open science, compared to the whole population of scholars. Thus, high levels of support for open science in prior surveys might reflect self-selection bias (Heckman, 1990). In the current study, we compare attitudes toward open …
How Do Infants Experience Caregiving
Almost all of human infants’ experience and learning takes place in the context of caregiving relationships. This essay considers how infants understand the care they receive. We begin by outlining plausible features of an “intuitive theory” of care. In this intuitive theory, caregiving has both a distinctive foundational structure and distinctive features that differentiate it from other social relationships. We then review methods and findings …
Inclusionary and Exclusionary Preferences
Exclusionary social policies take a significant toll on the mental and physical health of targeted groups. Support for specific exclusionary policies does not always align with general antipathy towards the targeted group, however. Does support for specific exclusionary policies rely on particular thought processes (i.e., cognitive mechanisms)? Does opposition? We investigate these questions through the lens of “bathroom laws” across two studies.…
Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour
An asynchronous, hands-off workflow for looking time experiments with infants
The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off" for the experimenter. We first replicate four classic VoE experiments in a synchronous online setting, and show …
Desperation and inequality increase stealing
People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime, but it is not clear why. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a level of resources critical to wellbeing. Below such a threshold, people should pursue any risky behaviour that offers the possibility of a short route back above, and should be insensitive to the severity …
Why has the Covid-19 pandemic increased support for Universal Basic Income
The onset of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic led to a marked increase in positive discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in political and media circles. However, we do not know whether there was a corresponding increase in support for the policy in the public at large, or why. Here, we present three studies carried out during 2020 in UK and US samples. In study 1 ( n = 802, April 2020), people expressed much stronger support for a UBI polic…
Preferences for redistribution are sensitive to perceived luck, social homogeneity, war and scarcity
Many human societies feature institutions for redistributing resources from some individuals to others, but preferred levels of redistribution vary greatly within and between populations. We postulate that support for redistribution is the output of a structured cognitive system that is sensitive to features of the social situation. We developed an experimental approach in which participants prescribe appropriate redistribution for hypothetical v…
Leveraging facial expressions and contextual information to investigate opaque representations of emotions
Observers attribute emotions to others relying on multiple cues, including facial expressions and information about the situation. Recent research has used Bayesian models to study how these cues are integrated. Existing studies have used a variety of tasks to probe emotion inferences, but limited attention has been devoted to the possibility that different decision processes might be involved depending on the task. If this is the case, understan…
Parochial Empathy Predicts Reduced Altruism and the Endorsement of Passive Harm
Empathic failures are common in hostile intergroup contexts; repairing empathy is therefore a major focus of peacebuilding efforts. However, it is unclear which aspect of empathy is most relevant to intergroup conflict. Although trait empathic concern predicts prosociality in interpersonal settings, we hypothesized that the best predictor of meaningful intergroup attitudes and behaviors might not be the general capacity for empathy (i.e., trait e…
Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing
Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free‐Viewing
How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal‐directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers bet…
The power of being heard
When ignorance is no excuse
Us and Them
People are often motivated to increase others' positive experiences and to alleviate others' suffering. These tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an outgroup member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help that “other.” In such cases, empathic responses are rare and fragile; it is easy to disrupt the chain from perception of suffering to motivation …
Action understanding as inverse planning
The neural basis of the interaction between theory of mind and moral judgment
Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent's beliefs and an action's consequences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior developmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differentially to the young child's moral judgments coupled with neurobiological…
Knowing who dunnit
Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of…
People thinking about thinking peopleThe role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”
The power of being heard
Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing
Knowing who dunnit
Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of…
People thinking about thinking peopleThe role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”
The neural basis of the interaction between theory of mind and moral judgment
Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent's beliefs and an action's consequences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior developmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differentially to the young child's moral judgments coupled with neurobiological…
Knowing who dunnit
Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of…
Action understanding as inverse planning
When ignorance is no excuse
Us and Them
People are often motivated to increase others' positive experiences and to alleviate others' suffering. These tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an outgroup member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help that “other.” In such cases, empathic responses are rare and fragile; it is easy to disrupt the chain from perception of suffering to motivation …
Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free‐Viewing
How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal‐directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers bet…
The power of being heard
Parochial Empathy Predicts Reduced Altruism and the Endorsement of Passive Harm
Empathic failures are common in hostile intergroup contexts; repairing empathy is therefore a major focus of peacebuilding efforts. However, it is unclear which aspect of empathy is most relevant to intergroup conflict. Although trait empathic concern predicts prosociality in interpersonal settings, we hypothesized that the best predictor of meaningful intergroup attitudes and behaviors might not be the general capacity for empathy (i.e., trait e…
Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing
Leveraging facial expressions and contextual information to investigate opaque representations of emotions
Observers attribute emotions to others relying on multiple cues, including facial expressions and information about the situation. Recent research has used Bayesian models to study how these cues are integrated. Existing studies have used a variety of tasks to probe emotion inferences, but limited attention has been devoted to the possibility that different decision processes might be involved depending on the task. If this is the case, understan…
Preferences for redistribution are sensitive to perceived luck, social homogeneity, war and scarcity
Many human societies feature institutions for redistributing resources from some individuals to others, but preferred levels of redistribution vary greatly within and between populations. We postulate that support for redistribution is the output of a structured cognitive system that is sensitive to features of the social situation. We developed an experimental approach in which participants prescribe appropriate redistribution for hypothetical v…
Why has the Covid-19 pandemic increased support for Universal Basic Income
The onset of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic led to a marked increase in positive discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in political and media circles. However, we do not know whether there was a corresponding increase in support for the policy in the public at large, or why. Here, we present three studies carried out during 2020 in UK and US samples. In study 1 ( n = 802, April 2020), people expressed much stronger support for a UBI polic…
Desperation and inequality increase stealing
People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime, but it is not clear why. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a level of resources critical to wellbeing. Below such a threshold, people should pursue any risky behaviour that offers the possibility of a short route back above, and should be insensitive to the severity …
Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour
An asynchronous, hands-off workflow for looking time experiments with infants
The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off" for the experimenter. We first replicate four classic VoE experiments in a synchronous online setting, and show …
How Do Infants Experience Caregiving
Almost all of human infants’ experience and learning takes place in the context of caregiving relationships. This essay considers how infants understand the care they receive. We begin by outlining plausible features of an “intuitive theory” of care. In this intuitive theory, caregiving has both a distinctive foundational structure and distinctive features that differentiate it from other social relationships. We then review methods and findings …
Inclusionary and Exclusionary Preferences
Exclusionary social policies take a significant toll on the mental and physical health of targeted groups. Support for specific exclusionary policies does not always align with general antipathy towards the targeted group, however. Does support for specific exclusionary policies rely on particular thought processes (i.e., cognitive mechanisms)? Does opposition? We investigate these questions through the lens of “bathroom laws” across two studies.…
Expectations of Reciprocal Generosity Are Specific to Equal Relationships
When someone acts generously, what expectations does this create? Classic theories and experiments emphasize reciprocity: the idea that generosity will be returned by the recipient. Yet daily-life and ethnographic observations often show a different pattern: generosity sets a precedent, leading people to expect the same person to be generous again. Across six online behavioral experiments (total N = 599 U.S. adults) using third-party vignette jud…
Support for open science is equally high in opt-in versus representative samples of scientists from a research-focused US university
Many studies on open science attitudes and practice use opt-in samples. This strategy poses a problem: It is unclear whether and to what degree scholars who opt in to surveys about open science are more likely to support open science, compared to the whole population of scholars. Thus, high levels of support for open science in prior surveys might reflect self-selection bias (Heckman, 1990). In the current study, we compare attitudes toward open …
Psychology (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Cognition (6 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (6 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (6 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (5 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)