United States

People engage in intentional misunderstandings to get around direct non-compliance. In other words, they use loopholes. Previous work showed that adults and children consider loophole behavior to be less costly than direct noncompliance (Bridgers, Schulz, &amp; Ullman, 2021), and suggested this is a primary reason for their use: loopholes will land you in less trouble than defiance. However, we propose that this difference between loopholes and defiance will not hold for a specific context: moral violations. We replicate the finding that loopholes are less costly in a neutral context, but find that engaging in loopholes in a moral context is as bad as non-compliance (Experiment 1, N=360). We then use a direct comparison between loopholes and non-compliance (N=150), to investigate whether in some contexts loopholes will be seen as even worse than non-compliance. We discuss possible extensions and limitations, and consider why loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.

CogSci 2023

Skirting the Sacred: Moral Violations make Intentional Misunderstandings Worse

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

People engage in intentional misunderstandings to get around direct non-compliance. In other words, they use loopholes. Previous work showed that adults and children consider loophole behavior to be less costly than direct noncompliance (Bridgers, Schulz, & Ullman, 2021), and suggested this is a primary reason for their use: loopholes will land you in less trouble than defiance. However, we propose that this difference between loopholes and defiance will not hold for a specific context: moral violations. We replicate the finding that loopholes are less costly in a neutral context, but find that engaging in loopholes in a moral context is as bad as non-compliance (Experiment 1, N=360). We then use a direct comparison between loopholes and non-compliance (N=150), to investigate whether in some contexts loopholes will be seen as even worse than non-compliance. We discuss possible extensions and limitations, and consider why loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
<br><br>

#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/tzgk/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>
<br>

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

We provide an empirical test for shared reality theory, which predicts individuals seek to share similar impressions about the world with others in order to connect and reduce uncertainty. We built an online platform permitting synchronous communication between groups of participants time-locked to video stimuli. We first presented participants with the same introduction to a reality show and then seamlessly showed different dyads within a group separate video segments depicting different social interactions between pairs of contestants. People reported feeling more connected to group members who underwent the same video experience compared to those who unknowingly watched a different video. The nature of the interactions also appeared to impact relationships as participants reported feeling more connected to partners who responded to their messages more quickly during the group chat. Together, these results highlight the importance of communication during shared experiences in aligning shared interpretations of reality and facilitating social connection.

Shared experiences strengthen social connectedness through shared impression formation and communication behavior

The question of how children develop multimodal coordination skills to engage in meaningful face-to-face conversations is crucial for our broader understanding of children's healthy socio-cognitive development. Here we focus on investigating the ability of school-age children to coordinate turns with their interlocutors, especially regarding when to take the floor (i.e., the main channel of the conversation) and when to provide attentive listening signals via the back channel. Using data of child-caregiver naturalistic conversations and data-driven research tools, we found that children aged 6 to 12 years old already show adult-like behavior both in terms of reacting to the relevant channel-specific cues and in terms of providing reliable, multimodal inviting cues to help their interlocutor select the most appropriate channel of the conversation.

Development of Multimodal Turn Coordination in Conversations: Evidence for Adult-like behavior in Middle Childhood

Social media is largely used as a tool to promote social connection among people and groups; yet that does not imply social media users are not lonely. Here we explore whether we can detect loneliness in individuals from their language and social indicators on Twitter. We define a sample of self-declared lonely Twitter users and compare their language to a matching random control sample. For each user we create a text em-
bedding for the content of their online posts, excluding terms and expressions related to loneliness. Using a principal component analysis of the resulting embeddings we position each user in a two-dimensional space spanned by the first two components. Lonely individuals are spatially separated from the control sample, indicating that lonely individuals exhibit distinct language patterns related to the expression of internalizing thoughts focused on the self, e.g. “I should” and “but I”. Indicators of online social relations, such as the number of online friends, favorites, mentions, indicate that lonely individuals have fewer social relations, while a sentiment analysis indicates that their posts have lower valence. Our results provide insights into the lexical, social, and affective markers that characterize loneliness online, providing a starting point for the development of diagnostics and prevention.

Quantifying the Digital Phenotype of Loneliness on Twitter

Languages describe spatial relations in different manners. It is however hypothesized that highly frequent ways of categorizing spatial relations across languages correspond to the natural ways humans conceptualize them. In this study, we explore the use of machine translation to gather data in semantic typology to address whether different languages show similarities in how they carve up space. We collected spatial descriptions in English, translated them using machine translation, and subsequently extracted spatial terms automatically. Our results suggest that most spatial descriptions are accurately translated. Despite limitations in our extraction of spatial terms, we obtain meaningful patterns of spatial relation categorization across languages. We discuss translation limits for semantic typology and possible future directions.

Typology of topological relations using machine translation

Classifiers are a noun categorization device found in many East and Southeast Asian languages. Their syntactic status is debated: some theories treat them as forming a constituent with the noun, others with the numeral. Typological data on how classifiers, numerals, and nouns are ordered largely support the classifier-with-numeral hypothesis: orders in which the noun intervenes between the numeral and the classifier are unattested. However, typological evidence is problematic in this case, because the distribution of classifiers is highly geographically constrained, and ordering tendencies may reflect language contact. In this study, we look for evidence of the syntactic status of classifiers using artificial language learning experiments. We test whether learners’ preference among patterns are predicted by one of these two accounts. Results suggest that, if anything, learners in fact prefer orders that group classifiers with the numeral.

Cognitive biases for word order between numeral, classifier and noun

Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) tools are steadily gaining prominence in educational settings given the ease and scale in which they can be deployed. Nevertheless, despite producing a similar performance as human raters, the accuracy of automated systems is often met with skepticism. In the current study we explore whether such skepticism extends to writing feedback believed to be generated by human tutors in training or an AI tutor under development. When both sources are fallible, are critical judgments mitigated? Participants (N=477) judged the accuracy of feedback on writing samples given by human or AI tutors where the feedback was normed to be accurate, inaccurate, and ambiguous. Results showed participants were still more likely to deem identical feedback provided by an AI, as compared to human tutors, as less accurate, and they were more confident in these evaluations. It appears that “novice” AWE systems are not completely immune to negative bias.

Fallible feedback: Judgments of "novice" automated and human writing tutors

Curiosity relates to learning and recent work shows robust associations between curiosity and recall of information in adults and children over age 10. The current study tested a similar association in younger children and explored children’s information-seeking behaviors. Children (n=90, 4-10-year-olds) played a free-exploration game in which they clicked shapes to learn different facts about different topics. They then recalled what they remembered learning on the task (recall) and asked questions about what they were curious to know more about (curiosity). We observed a positive association between children’s curiosity and recall of information, even when controlling for amount of information seeking and children’s age. This association was specifically seen for recall without memory cues. There was no association between children’s curiosity and information seeking behavior, and children showed a strong tendency of breadth exploration over exploring in depth with some indication of children beginning to explore depth more with age.


Exploring to learn: Curiosity, breadth and depth of exploration, and recall in young children

Categories simplify the vast number of entities we encounter into equivalence classes, serving as a fundamental block of our cognition. This simplification of information supports our ability to reason about and interact with members of each category. In adulthood, selective attention helps us form categories efficiently by focusing on relevant attributes while filtering out irrelevant information. However, young children tend to encode more attributes than necessary, and this developmental difference is partly due to a prolonged development of selective attention. In the current study, we proposed another important contributor to the development. As shown in three experiments, children prefer information gathering to efficiency, regardless of its value. Experiment 1 revealed that children sample more information than adults even when filtering demands are low. Experiment 2 further supports children's preference for information. And Experiment 3 eliminates alternative explanations, demonstrating that children enjoy gathering information rather than motor actions associated with it.

Driven by Information: Children's Exploration Shapes Their Distributed Attention in Category Learning

Young children acquire a wide range of linguistic and cognitive skills in the first three years of life. Decades of experimental work have established a solid empirical foundation for our understanding of cognitive development. But most experimental studies are limited in statistical power and focus on specific psychological constructs, thus making them unsuitable for describing developmental growth at scale. Here, we turned to meta-analyses of experimental research. We conducted a meta-meta-analysis to consolidate and integrate 23 meta-analyses compiled on MetaLab, a community-augmented meta-analysis platform. We found that most datasets can not meaningfully distinguish different functional forms for developmental change, but in those that could, there is great diversity in the best-fitting functional forms of the age model. We also evaluated the impact of a range of methodological factors. Overall, our work sheds light on the heterogeneous nature of developmental trajectories and the subtle interactions between research methods and experimental outcomes.

A synthesis of early cognitive and language development using (meta-)meta-analysis

The concept of a good life is usually assumed by philosophers to be equivalent to that of well-being, or perhaps of a morally good life, and hence has received little attention as a potentially distinct subject matter. In a series of experiments participants were presented with vignettes involving socially sanctioned wrongdoing toward outgroup members. Findings indicated that, for a large majority, judgments of bad character strongly reduce ascriptions of the good life, while having no impact at all on ascriptions of happiness or well-being. Taken together with earlier findings these results suggest that the lay concept of a good life is clearly distinct from those of happiness, well-being, or morality, likely encompassing both morality and well-being, and perhaps other values as well: whatever matters in a person’s life. Importantly, morality appears not to play a fundamental role in either happiness or well-being among the folk.



Premium content

Downloads

Next from CogSci 2023

Shared experiences strengthen social connectedness through shared impression formation and communication behavior

Similar lecture

Language Models Identify Ambiguities and Exploit Loopholes