@article {4508, title = {Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics}, journal = {PLOS ONE}, volume = {14}, year = {2019}, month = {05/2020}, pages = {e0217513}, abstract = {

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them. Such beliefs are likely affected by people{\textquoteright}s intuitive theories of the real world. In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations. People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics. For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground. A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants. A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2. These results suggest that people{\textquoteright}s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

}, doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.021751310.1371}, url = {http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217513}, author = {John P. McCoy and Ullman, Tomer}, editor = {Capraro, Valerio} } @conference {4450, title = {People{\textquoteright}s perceptions of others{\textquoteright} risk preferences.}, booktitle = {Cognitive Science Society}, year = {2019}, author = {Shari Liu and John P. McCoy and Ullman, Tomer D.} } @article {4197, title = {A Minimal Turing Test}, journal = {Journal of Experimental Social Psychology}, volume = {79}, year = {2018}, month = {11/2018}, pages = {1 - 8}, abstract = {

We introduce the Minimal Turing Test, an experimental paradigm for studying perceptions and meta-perceptions of different social groups or kinds of agents, in which participants must use a single word to convince a judge of their identity. We illustrate the paradigm by having participants act as contestants or judges in a Minimal Turing Test in which contestants must convince a judge they are a human, rather than an artificial intelligence. We embed the production data from such a large-scale Minimal Turing Test in a semantic vector space, and construct an ordering over pairwise evaluations from judges. This allows us to identify the semantic structure in the words that people give, and to obtain quantitative measures of the importance that people place on different attributes. Ratings from independent coders of the production data provide additional evidence for the agency and experience dimensions discovered in previous work on mind perception. We use the theory of Rational Speech Acts as a framework for interpreting the behavior of contestants and judges in the Minimal Turing Test.

}, keywords = {Meta-stereotypes, Mind perception, Natural language processing, Stereotypes, Turing Test}, issn = {00221031}, doi = {10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.007}, url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0022103117303980}, author = {John P. McCoy and Ullman, Tomer D.} }