newsletter: april 2025
meet this month's guest editor, Razia Sahi
🌺🌺☀️☀️😎🌻
hi, it’s jordan! spring is upon us!
i’m thrilled to introduce this month’s guest editor, Dr. Razia Sahi!
🌺🌺☀️☀️😎🌻
….want to be a guest editor for an upcoming newsletter?
shoot us an email, sign up via this google form, or DM us on twitter or bluesky & we’ll tell you more!!
Razia Sahi 🐬🌀
about me
Hi, I’m Razia! I’m from all over: My parents are from Pakistan, I was born in Chicago, IL, grew up in Houston, TX, spent my early adult life in New York, NY, lived in Atlanta, GA, for a few years, got my Ph.D. in Los Angeles, CA, and now my ongoing postdoc at Princeton University and upcoming faculty position at Rutgers-Newark have landed me in New Jersey. I love city life, but I also have a deep fondness for all things nature. In California this manifested in a lot of beach time, complete with surf sessions and breakfast burritos, but now that I’m on the east coast it means I like spending time amongst the trees listening to birds, finding mushrooms, floating in a kayak under canopies, or whatever other chill outdoor things I can get into. I’m excited to continue getting to know this terrain over the coming years. As much as I love nature, I love connecting with other people and am fascinated by how deeply social we are as a species. We hang together not just because we can better coordinate survival in groups, but because we value exchanging ideas with each other. This melding of the minds plays a powerful role in shaping how we think and feel about the world around us. I work to understand this process in my research by integrating social interactions into how we study emotion regulation. I hope this work helps us figure out how we can better navigate emotional challenges together. I can’t wait to expand this research program in my lab and help foster new ideas about these processes in the next generation of scholars.
📺 WATCHING 👀
I watch a lot of TV. An underrated show in the line-up right now is Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal. It’s an animated series about a caveman and a dinosaur – beautiful, sad, and profound.
📚READING 🤓
In all honesty, I don’t read enough outside of work. But I’m currently reading this book called Wool – a post-apocalyptic sci-fi dystopia. It’s fun!
👂LISTENING 🎧
My husband and I have a growing cassette tape collection (we enjoy the lo-fi vibe), and some of my favorites in rotation lately have been albums by Pixies, The Cranberries, and Marvin Gaye. I also listen to KXLU (the best radio station) all the time!
💻 PAPERS I’D LIKE TO SHARE 👇
If you’re interested in how people regulate emotions together, checkout this new special edition in Emotion on Interpersonal Emotion Regulation! I haven’t read all the papers yet, but I’m planning to make my way through. I’ve got a paper in there too :)
🚨🚨 Another note from Razia:
Keep an eye out for job postings soon for my lab!
✌✌✌
in support & science,
📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚
eliana hadjiandreou
ivy gilbert
jordan wylie
minjae kim
THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩
💎 awesome work by marginalia and affiliated scientists 💎
Ambivalence by design: A computational account of loopholes
Qian, P., Bridgers, S., Taliaferro, M., Parece, K., & Ullman, T. D. | Cognition (2024)
Loopholes offer an opening. Rather than comply or directly refuse, people can subvert an intended request by an intentional misunderstanding. Such behaviors exploit ambiguity and under-specification in language. Using loopholes is commonplace and intuitive in everyday social interaction, both familiar and consequential. Loopholes are also of concern in the law, and increasingly in artificial intelligence. However, the computational and cognitive underpinnings of loopholes are not well understood. Here, we propose a utility-theoretic recursive social reasoning model that formalizes and accounts for loophole behavior. The model captures the decision process of a loophole-aware listener, who trades off their own utility with that of the speaker, and considers an expected social penalty for non-cooperative behavior. The social penalty is computed through the listener’s recursive reasoning about a virtual naive observer’s inference of a naive listener’s social intent. Our model captures qualitative patterns in previous data, and also generates new quantitative predictions consistent with novel studies (N = 265). We consider the broader implications of our model for other aspects of social reasoning, including plausible deniability and humor.
Stylianos Syropoulos & Gregg Sparkman | PNAS (2025)
Nearly 90% of U.S. Christian religious leaders believe in anthropogenic climate change, with most believing human activity is a major contributor. Yet roughly half have never discussed it with their congregation, and only a quarter have mentioned it more than once or twice. U.S. Christians substantially underestimate the prevalence of their leaders who believe in climate change. Providing the actual consensus level of religious leaders’ belief in climate change reduces congregants’ misperception of religious leaders, increases their perception that other church members believe in and are open to discussing climate change, and leads Christians to believe that taking climate action is consistent with their church’s values while voting for politicians who will not take climate action is not.
👓 OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 🚀
Essentialism in the Human Mind conference (4/26 @ UMass Amherst) – this two-day event will feature symposium-style talks, key discussions on essentialism, vision-planning sessions for future collaborations, and social events to build connections. registration deadline is 4/1 (today!!)
Visionary Grants through the APA are due 4/3
Trends in Psychology Summit (TiPS) takes place on May 3rd. Registration still open!
Check out S4 Ep10 of the Minds Matter Podcast featuring Marginalia guest editor Dr. Mikaela Spruill!
🌱 JOB-MARKET RESOURCES 🌱
no matter where you’re at right now – offer in hand, fingers-still-crossed, looking at post-bad opportunities, post-docs, exploring options outside academia – we support you! here are some resources that might be of interest:
Postdoc position with Rik Henson and Emily Holmes, at the Emotional Cognition Lab https://lnkd.in/dDBteuG6, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, to conduct advanced memory modelling. Details here: https://lnkd.in/djUa8f96. The deadline to apply is 21st of April.
Sloan post-doc in metascience & AI. Applications due by 5PM on April 10
Full-time Research Specialist Position at the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab, directed by Dr. Diana Tamir: https://psnlab.princeton.edu/join-us
Full-time RA position in the Social & Cognitive Origins group at Johns Hopkins University (social-cognitive-origins.com), directed by Dr. Christopher Krupenye: https://jobs.jhu.edu/job/Baltimore-Research-Assistant-MD-21218/1275352000/
and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!
Super cool to read about you and your work, Razia!