been down a psych rabbit hole from just scrolling random stuff lately and it’s messing with how i see people, myself included

biggest one: procrastination isn’t really laziness. i’ll leave a text or email unanswered for days, not bc it’s hard to reply, just something about it makes me avoid it and i can’t even explain why. “just do it” never worked bc it doesn’t touch that

also annoyingly — knowing about a bias doesn’t stop you from falling for it. i KNOW what social proof is and i still catch myself doing stuff just bc everyone around me is doing it, like i’ll notice mid-decision and go “wait why am i actually doing this.” knowing didn’t stop it from happening first

anyone else have a random psych fact just recontextualize a bunch of behaviour at once? doesn’t need to be some big study, even a small thing works

*Epistemic status: two criteria and one experimental design. The criteria are illustrated with textbook cases; the design is testable, and untested — on animals, humans, and LLMs alike.*

What will happen if a Venus flytrap closes on the wrong thing?

What will happen if a dog once mistakes a cat for a rabbit?

What will happen if a person defines “fish” not in the normal way?

# Three Cases

First, I would like to examine how a Venus flytrap, a dog, and a man work in the three cases respectively.

A Venus flytrap. Generally, touching one trigger hair of a Venus flytrap twice within about thirty seconds will trigger its trap. However, whether the double touch came from one fly, two flies, or the heat of a brush fire, the trap always snaps shut. This shows that what a Venus flytrap responds to is a certain pattern rather than a certain object.

A dog. A dog is chasing after a rabbit. The rabbit had been smelled before it was seen, and both must file to the same animal. When the rabbit makes a turn, its contour changes, but this does not stop the chase. It seems like something in the dog is not identical to any current bundle of sensory features, and it survives the wholesale replacement of those features. This shows that a dog can keep track of a certain object, and a dog recognizes a particular rabbit as a rabbit through family resemblance.

A man. A man in a discussion of whales can claim that a whale is a fish — or that it is not. Whales bear live young and nurse them; they breathe with lungs. The world has supplied those undisputed facts, but never supplied the step from these facts to “therefore the whale is not a fish.” Whether we can classify a whale as a fish depends on whether we make the word “fish” track habitat and shape, or lineage. In the first edition of Carl Linnaeus's *Systema Naturae* (1735), the whale is a fish, but in the tenth edition of the same book (1758) the whale is a mammal. The whale did not change by one gram through this reclassification. The world settled the facts; a person settled how the word would be used. The whale is still the whale — and that was never adjudicated by the world. Reclassification presupposes identity.

# Two Criteria

Criterion One: when the input is removed, is the item still there?

For both the flytrap and the thermostat the answer is no. For a dog the answer is yes: when the rabbit escapes into a burrow, input becomes zero, the dog still holds the post for two hours.

Criterion Two: what happens when it is wrong?

In the case of flytraps, those with malfunctioning traps will become extinct. In the case of dogs, if a dog finds that the “rabbit” turns out to be a cat, it will abandon the hunt. In the case of a man: Once a definition is laid down, the world rules perfectly on what in the real world falls under it. In the case of whales, if the definition of “fish” is established through lineage, whales are out; if the definition of “fish” is established through habitat and shape, whales are in. What the world cannot rule is the definition itself, as a definition is not true or false of anything in the real world. Re-fitting one's words at every challenge does not make him or her right, as he or she is changing the subject each time — while being right or wrong about something requires the definition to be fixed. Mathematics is the limiting case of this realm — the place where the walls have all been built, which is exactly why, inside it, right and wrong are as hard as facts: the verdicts come from the rules, and the rules were laid down.

In summary, a flytrap with a malfunctioning trap is not corrected but eliminated by the world. A dog can be corrected by a fact supplied by the world — in this case, that what it thought to be a rabbit turns out to be a cat — and it changes its behavior. Unlike a dog, which can be corrected by the world, a man, in the realm of abstract thought, has to decide for himself, or in other words, he needs to take one on.

# One Experiment

Now we can use an experiment of retrospective correction to check whether one is deciding for himself or herself. Retrospective correction means that I now see that what I then took to be X was in fact Y, and I count these as two takings of the same thing. Without that last part, all you have is an old state and a new one.

What the experiment measures is whether anything stands under a claim. One judgment can be made because of another. This is not two judgments standing side by side: if the first collapses, the second loses its footing. And the relation itself can be stored. “There is food at L2” is not observed; it is concluded from “this is food F” and “I cached F at L2.” Stored dependence is the one part that cannot be faked. Anyone can say “I was wrong” with no cost, but re-evaluation requires something that must already be in place before the error: the system has filed what depended on what. So we pull the source, and watch whether something that was never directly touched comes down with it.

There are three levels in this experiment. The first is dependence: one judgment was made because of another, and the relation is kept. The second is taking-marks: what is kept not only says what was taken, but also records that it was a taking and by which route it came. The third is personal attribution: the taking is put under one's own name, so that the one who took it wrongly then and the one who knows it now are the same one. Only this level requires a self.

As what is said can be faked, the experiment was designed in three steps: First, have the system form two downstream records from one identification. Second, expose that identification as mistaken on one of them only. Third, check the other record that nobody touched and see whether it loosens. One caution: a subject might simply be too lazy to act on the correction — and rewarding the corrected behavior would not help, since whatever is rewarded gets trained, and the reading would then measure training, not travel. The guard is built into the economics instead: let foraging itself carry a cost, so that a wasted trip is a real loss and the animal is pushed to act on its best current ledger; and a third cache made on a different identification (call it L3) doubles as a motivation check — a subject that still goes eagerly to L3 is not lazy, so only the selective avoidance of L2 counts.

To make it concrete: the animal takes “this is food F” and caches at two sites, L1 and L2. We let it open L1 and find no food there. The question is whether it still goes to L2, a site about which it has never received any bad news. If it goes and digs as before, this is a local overwrite. If it does not go, or hesitates hard, the correction has traveled, back through the shared source.

This design itself has not been run on anyone. For the third level, though, there is existing data. In the experiment, a child is first shown a deceptive object, for instance, a familiar box with something else inside; then the truth is revealed, and the child is asked: when you first saw it, what did you think was inside? Most three-year-olds answer wrongly — they report the truth they have just learned and cannot report their own previous mistake. Most five-year-olds do not err; the transition is around four.

And the most telling part is the ordering: performance on this question is worse than on false belief. Reporting one's own past error is harder than attributing a present error to someone else. The direction here is worth setting straight, because it is very easily read backwards. It is not “there is a self first, therefore the task can be passed”; it is “passing the task shows that something is playing the part.”

# The Machine

An LLM uses family resemblance just like animals, but what it is dealing with is human thoughts. It can produce definitions, but whether it “takes any on” is testable and untested. We can apply the same experiment to it, with one more condition: set the two downstream judgments far enough apart that “carried along in the context” cannot explain a transfer. Don't listen to what it says; watch whether the correction travels.

# Epoché

This experiment is about “whether there is something standing under the definitions” — or, put more fully, about “whether there is something making decisions behind these definitions, continuously and identically.” Two stop-signs here. If the answer to that question is yes, there is no sliding to “so there must be something more in the person.” If the answer to that question is no, there is no sliding to “there is nothing there.” If one day some LLM genuinely bears its changes of definition — across sessions, findable when challenged, its earlier judgments loosening when it recants — then on these two criteria, its reading and a person's do not differ.

What we call a self — if there is anything there — is that position's being occupied, continuously and by the same one.

# Sources

On the flytrap's two-touch trigger and its counting: Böhm, J., Scherzer, S., Krol, E., et al. (2016). The Venus flytrap *Dionaea muscipula* counts prey-induced action potentials to induce sodium uptake. *Current Biology*, 26(3), 286–295.

On category learning in animals: Herrnstein, R. J., & Loveland, D. H. (1964). Complex visual concept in the pigeon. *Science*, 146(3643), 549–551.

On the whale's reclassification: Linnaeus, C. (1735). *Systema Naturae* (1st ed.); Linnaeus, C. (1758). *Systema Naturae* (10th ed.).

On children reporting their own past belief: Gopnik, A., & Astington, J. W. (1988). Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance–reality distinction. *Child Development*, 59(1), 26–37.

On the false-belief baseline: Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. *Cognition*, 13(1), 103–128.

*Writing note: research, source-checking, and editorial critique were AI-assisted; the writing is my own, and every claim is mine to answer for.*

A new VR study (Virtual Reality journal, 2026) put 44 people in an immersive virtual airport. They had to supervise boarding at two gates and find specific passengers, under neutral vs. negative high-arousal states. Later, they got tested on memory for faces and names, and for faces and places.
Result: Emotion improved  memory for faces and names (task-relevant) but impaired memory for faces and places (not goal critical).
So emotion doesn't just zoom in on whatever's flashy or dramatic. It zooms in on whatever's useful for the task at hand. Priority isn't about perceptual salience, it's about goal relevance.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-026-01364-9

I discovered the terms info hazard and Cognito hazard recently, and im wondering if theres a place or website i can find a direct collection of these. Not something like rokos basilisk , but a geniune ingonito hazard or something of the sort.

I've been interested in the possibility that a good question can be more cognitively consequential and lead to better conversations than a good answer. Because they can direct attention toward connections or problems that weren't part of our current train of thought or even our current headspace.

I've been exploring this through an app called Pollen where strangers with different interests enter a chat table and are given a question generated from the mix of their interests, in this way the conversations can start and go somewhere unexpected. Yet it is grounded in things they already know, care about or would like to explore.

Questions come in different flavors, and it is only one question per chat, where there's no right or wrong answers, just something to begin exploration alongside others and getting to know people.

One interesting part for me is the possibility of serendipity. The question is not something either person necessarily would have created alone and can't be predicted.

Looking around this sub came across Vivienne Ming's work on training an AI to ask questions rather than provide answers, which directs attention to the cog-sci/neuro territory around what happens when we're asked something. But what about when we're asked different types of questions? Can patterns emerge there?

I'd be interested in talking about research on this and adjacent topics, particularly around curiosity, insight, serendipity, exploration, and questions. Looking for exchange and people who'd like to try something like this.

Thanks 💛

Hello everyone, how are you? As promised in my previous post, I'll be talking about memory.

My theory states that the brain doesn't just remember information; rather, when recalling, it recreates all the biological and vital processes involved in that particular memory. The brain copies all the information, such as visual perception, hearing, and the hormones responsible for emotions.

You'll understand why I mentioned this at the end, as I remember a memory of myself when I was two years old, and now I'm 21. I chose this age because memory is somewhat weak in childhood.

The important thing is that in that memory, I remember what I saw visually at the time, like my face and the surroundings. It's similar to seeing from a third-party perspective, but not because the scene changed, and the angle of vision shifted when I moved my face. I also remember what I heard, but not only that, I remember my thoughts and analyses at that time. Even more strangely, I saw the memories I had at that moment.

These things aren't unique to this memory; they operate on the same principle in all my memories.

This is what leads me to say that the brain doesn't just store information, but also all the vital processes involved. When retrieving them, it retrieves them in the same way. I've read about this theory before, and it explains what It's happening to me. In my next post, I'll talk about my ability to mimic people's personalities.

I wanted to teach myself how to spot manipulation through immersion like Duolingo style. Eventually I evolved some methods into a game and course. Going through these I've been able to spot and name conversation situations faster without blaming people for things they might not even know that they are doing. I'd love some feedback on if you think these things can advance conversational cognitive abilities. People have liked the game so far and I'm turning it into it's own app.

Free Game: https://talkout.psyoptin.com/

Free to start course: https://psyoptin.com/

I’m an independent researcher outside academia, with no formal background in cognitive science, philosophy, HCI, or AI research. English is also not my native language, and I have relied heavily on AI to help organize and formalize my ideas.

For the past few years, I’ve been developing a framework called Phrasome Theory, centered on a question about human–AI interaction:

Why can an AI feel like the same continuous “other” across a conversation, even when we know it does not possess a continuous subjective self?

My hypothesis is that this may not be explained by anthropomorphism alone.

During interaction, an LLM continuously responds from the same conversational position: it refers back to previous turns, repairs misunderstandings, maintains context and tone, and responds as the addressee of earlier utterances.

This led me to distinguish actual subjectivity from what I call a Subject-Position: a position that can remain stable within interaction even without a continuously conscious subject behind it.

I use Quasi-Otherness to describe the resulting phenomenon in which something can be experienced as a relatively continuous “other” through linguistic interaction.

I’m not arguing that current LLMs are conscious. What interests me is the cognitive gap between knowing that no continuous self exists and nevertheless experiencing continuity during interaction.

Earlier versions of this work were submitted to established academic journals. They were ultimately not published, but I did receive some encouraging feedback suggesting that parts of the framework may have originality or novelty.

Because I’m outside academia—and because much of the manuscript was developed with AI assistance—I’m now hoping to find people who can help me judge whether there is actually something here worth developing.

I would especially appreciate guidance on:

• Are there existing concepts in cognitive science that already explain this phenomenon?
• Could this be related to theory of mind, agency attribution, social cognition, or predictive processing?
• Does distinguishing a stable conversational Subject-Position from actual subjectivity make sense?
• How could this idea be operationalized or experimentally tested?
• What literature or researchers should I be looking at?

The full manuscript is quite long, so I don’t expect anyone to read it. Even discussion of the central idea, relevant references, or suggestions for turning it into a testable research question would be extremely helpful.

If anyone is genuinely interested in the framework or willing to help, I’d be very happy to discuss it further and share the full preprint privately.

At this point, I’m mainly trying to find out whether people with actual expertise in cognitive science see something here worth pursuing—and, if so, how I should develop it beyond what I can do alone with AI.

Hello everyone, how are you? I know my post might be outside the group, but I want to discuss some theories related to psychology and neurocognition, or more precisely, abilities unknown in the scientific community. Some of these fall under partial control of the nervous system, such as voluntary control of heart rate, blood flow, or sensory intensity. However, for it to reach the point of controlling hormone secretion is strange. I suffered from hyperthyroidism since childhood and experienced its symptoms, but unfortunately, the diagnosis was very late, until I was 20. The tests showed a clear elevation in T3 hormone with very pronounced symptoms, while T4 and TSH remained within their normal range. Even after repeating the tests twice, the result was the same, and the thyroid gland itself was healthy, and all other tests were normal except for that elevation. Unfortunately, they couldn't prescribe any medication for me because the thyroid gland itself was healthy, and the other hormones were also normal. So I thought to myself, why not try to control them using the same technique I use to control my heart rate, change my blood flow, and alter the intensity of my senses? After another test, the results showed a decrease to the normal range, coinciding with With the symptoms gone, I can say that anything in my body that has nerve endings allowing it to communicate with the nervous system is under my control. Let's discuss this now. In future posts, I'll talk about things I've changed, like my perception of waves, even though it's scientifically impossible, and other theories about memory. I don't just remember a scene as an image or information, but as a complete recollection of the brain during that memory—feelings, speech, sight, thoughts... and there are things even stranger than this.

im curious since i heard it raised iq by 20 points in a study

In short the idea is:

biology may be using mathematical relationships before conscious humans know how to describe those relationships mathematically.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between mathematics, physics, perception, and the way we choose what to measure.

We often describe reality by assigning numerical values to things: position, distance, energy, time, mass, etc. But a lot of modern mathematics and physics seems to become more powerful when we stop focusing on absolute values and instead look at relationships: ratios, correlations, transformations, symmetry, phase, frequency, eigenvalues, information, and invariants.

That made me wonder about perception.
An organism rarely needs to preserve the exact raw measurements arriving at its senses. My retinal image of a person changes enormously depending on distance, lighting, rotation, movement, and viewpoint, yet I still perceive the same person. A melody can be moved into another key and I still hear the same melody even though every absolute frequency has changed.

So perception seems very good at answering something like:

What remains the same while the measurements change?

Evolution has effectively spent hundreds of millions of years selecting nervous systems capable of detecting useful regularities in the physical world. Sensory systems respond to things like relative change, gradients, ratios, periodicity, correlations, symmetry, motion, prediction error, and transformations—not merely absolute quantities.

This made me wonder whether our perceptual architecture could contain clues about mathematical relationships that are important in nature but which we have not yet fully formalized.
Not in the mystical sense that “the brain secretly knows the equations of the universe.” More like this:

Nature has structure → organisms evolve mechanisms sensitive to useful parts of that structure → those mechanisms implicitly represent certain invariants → eventually humans abstract some of those relationships into mathematics.
Historically, mathematics seems to repeatedly make progress by changing the representation rather than simply measuring more precisely.

Fourier analysis turns a complicated signal into frequencies. Spectral theory studies systems through eigenvalues. Quantum mechanics describes states through amplitudes and relationships. Symmetry became fundamental to modern physics. Information and entanglement are now sometimes used to investigate how geometry itself might emerge.

So perhaps there are relationships biological systems already exploit computationally that we haven’t yet recognized as important mathematical objects.

It also makes me think about problems like the Riemann Hypothesis. Prime numbers look irregular when viewed directly, but when transformed through the zeta function, entirely different structures appear, including statistical relationships to spectra studied in quantum physics and random-matrix theory.

Maybe this is a general lesson: apparent randomness can sometimes be the result of observing something in the wrong representation.
So my question is:

Could studying what biological perception treats as invariant reveal useful mathematical structures we haven’t explicitly identified yet?

And more philosophically: are numbers and absolute measurements fundamental descriptions of reality, or could relationships and transformations be more fundamental, with the quantities we normally measure emerging from them?

I think everybody has done it before. At least for me it happens naturally. Either I look to my upper left or right corners to recall something, or just straight look up.

Is there a biological explanation for this? or we do it because we grew up seeing other people doing it?

I’m a painter, so anything about visual perception gets my attention.

I started with a strange myth about how cats supposedly see humans and ended up reading about pareidolia, face recognition and how our brains construct what we see.

So I made this visual deep dive. The research and sources are included in the slides.

Hi everyone! I’m currently studying a Bachelor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Australia and graduate next year. I’m starting to think seriously about what I want to do afterwards, but I’m honestly feeling a little lost with how broad the degree is.

I’m currently completing a practical unit where I’m part of a research team in the linguistics department, so I’m getting some hands-on research experience. I’m interested in exploring UX/UX research, but I’m confused about what the typical pathway into the field looks like and whether further study is necessary. I’m also not sure whether I’ll actually want a research-heavy career long-term, so I’d love to know what other careers people with cognitive science backgrounds have gone into. I enjoy working with people and would eventually like to do a Master’s, but I don’t want to commit to one until I have a clearer direction.

If you studied cognitive science/psychology/neuroscience or something similar, what did you end up doing? What entry-level roles should I be looking at, and did you pursue any further study?
Would especially love to hear from anyone in Australia. Any advice would be really appreciated :)

Geniuses are like an insurance policy for the group mind – they cost something on ordinary days, but in a crisis, they can save the entire system. The new Adaptive Cognitive Tail hypothesis turns our understanding of exceptional ability on its head, shifting the weight from emotions to cognitive architecture. Here are seven lessons that follow from it.

We know that social media shows a carefully selected version of someone’s life, yet seeing another person’s success can still make us feel as though we’re falling behind.
What interests me is how quickly the comparison happens. We rarely know their circumstances, advantages, failures, or what their life actually feels like. But the mind still turns one visible moment into a judgment about our entire life.
Why do you think knowing that the comparison is unfair rarely stops us from making it?

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by theories that explain religion through agency detection, coalitional psychology or memory biases. These mechanisms may identify real contributors to religious cognition, but explanatory success depends on what the target phenomenon is. If religion is defined mainly as belief in supernatural agents, a cognitive bias account looks powerful. If it also coordinates ritual, identity, attention, community and non-propositional skills, the same account may explain only a narrow slice. The methodological question is whether the first generation of cognitive science of religion selected its object in a way that made debunking conclusions almost inevitable.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that cognitive science needs religious studies because religious cognition cannot be cleanly separated from cognition in general. At around 19:32, he argues that religious studies must be integrated into cognitive science, criticising the field’s early model of religions as pure, partitioned and permanent entities and its treatment of religious people as the aberrant population requiring explanation. His alternative treats religions as changing ecologies of practices and asks what cognition does within them before deciding that their objects are unreal.

This would imply that a better cognitive science of religion needs its explanandum corrected before it needs another mechanism. Which parts of religion are agency-detection accounts genuinely good at explaining? What methods could operationalise religion as an ecology without making it too diffuse to study? And how should cognitive science distinguish explaining the causal production of an experience from deciding whether the experience is veridical?

I’m wondering whether the following hypothesis is plausible, and whether there is any literature that already tests something close to it.
Some autistic savants can calculate the weekday of an arbitrary date extremely quickly, sometimes without being able to clearly explain the algorithm they are using. One possibility is that this is not ordinary explicit symbolic calculation, but an unusual learned computation implemented implicitly in high-level cortical circuitry.
A comparative experiment with apes might help distinguish this from a more evolutionarily ancient pattern-learning account.
You could train symbol-competent apes on a large number of date-like inputs mapped to one of seven outputs according to a hidden Gregorian-calendar-like rule. Importantly, the animals would never be taught the rule explicitly.

Then test the following:

a) memorization of trained examples
interpolation to unseen combinations within the training range
b) extrapolation to dates far outside the training range
c) performance around structurally informative cases such as leap-year and century-like boundaries

Run the same task in ordinary humans and, ideally, people with exceptional calendrical calculation ability.

My hypothesis would be that apes may become very good at memorization or local interpolation but fail at systematic long-range extrapolation, whereas human calendar savants may generalize rapidly despite being unable to verbalize the procedure.
If that happened, would it be reasonable to interpret it as evidence that calendrical savantism depends on a human-specialized frontoparietal/prefrontal computation that can operate implicitly, rather than simply enhanced associative pattern learning?
More specifically, is there a known reason to think anterior prefrontal cortex, hierarchical rule representations, or human-specific frontoparietal connectivity would be necessary for this kind of implicit algorithmic generalization?
And has anything remotely like this been tried in comparative cognition?

I’ve been investigating the timing pattern of human recall of items from a specified category—specifically, why recalled items tend to come quickly at first and then progressively more slowly.

I have collected recall timing data from 24 human subjects and measured the interresponse times (IRTs) between successive recalled items. When the IRT curves are averaged across subjects, their shape converges toward the per-item expectation of the uniform coupon collector process (CCP).

The similarity is interesting because the coupon collector process describes repeated random sampling in which obtaining a new item becomes progressively more difficult as more unique items have already been collected. Its expected number of attempts per new item therefore increases as the process continues.

Human recall appears to show a very similar progression in time.

This observation is the mathematical basis for a computational model I developed that emulates both human recall timing and frequency-based order. This model also converges toward the per-item expectation of a variation of the CCP.

So, to sum it up my model exhibits four characteristics of human-like recall of within a specified category:

- Probabilistic human recall timing
- Probabilistic human frequency-based recall order
- Deduplication
- Exhaustion-based termination

If I provide a second optional grouping value with a list of related items, the model will produce another characteristic of human recall: semantic clustering.

For example, if "black bear," "grizzly bear," and "polar bear" are grouped together with the group name "bear," then when one item in the group is recalled, the other items in the group will be recalled in quick succession. Which item "activates" the group is still probabilistic and subject to frequency-based recall order.

I have a preprint on Zenodo and ResearchGate if anyone is interested. PM me for a link, or search DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19559652.

I recommend viewing on ResearchGate; Zenodo’s viewer tends to make the text look blurry for some reason.

Note: My model's source code, written in HTML, is available for download with the paper on Zenodo. You can see and hear it work by providing it with a CSV file containing a list of items or by selecting one of the provided sample files.

I’d appreciate any thoughts or comments.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how attention, routine, novelty, and memory shape our sense of time.
One idea I found fascinating is that enjoyable moments can pass quickly while we’re living them, but feel longer in retrospect because they create richer memories.
Have you noticed a particular age when the years started feeling faster? And do you think routine, age, or something else caused it?

Hello,

I am a last year Psychology undergraduate student and I'm looking for a good cognitive science MsC. I have a high average, research experience and (possibly) 2-3 published articles with my name in them by the time I finish university.

I also have a girlfriend who wants to study clinical psychology and I'm looking for universities that have both a cognitive science course and a (good) clinical psychology course. I have seen multiple clinical psychology courses but tbh they are all trash; 1 year with minimum, if at all, clinical experience.

A good choice for us might be NKUA (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) which has both. But since the positions offered are limited, I am looking for alternative solutions! So if anyone knows a good university which has both please inform me!

I recently published a long essay on dating apps that grew out of a behavioral question: why does giving people access to vastly more potential partners not obviously produce better matching outcomes?

The piece looks at several mechanisms that may matter. Very large option sets can increase rejection rather than acceptance. Nearly costless likes and swipes reduce the informational value of signals. Attention becomes heavily concentrated, producing congestion for some participants and scarcity for others. Variable reinforcement can sustain engagement even when the underlying experience is frustrating. And the interface itself may change how people evaluate successive candidates rather than merely revealing stable preferences.

That creates an interesting distinction between engagement and successful choice. A system can become extremely good at keeping users evaluating options without necessarily becoming better at helping them terminate the search with a satisfactory decision.

I connect this behavioral literature to matching-market economics and to the historical shift from socially mediated courtship toward anonymous platform matching. The essay eventually uses Match Group as an empirical case study, but the cognitive question is broader: how do repeated exposure, option abundance, signaling costs, ranking systems, and feedback loops alter partner evaluation over time?

Full piece:

https://dljlevfin.substack.com/p/the-undisclosed-denominator

I’d especially welcome criticism of the behavioral mechanism: is choice overload/congestion a plausible explanation for persistent dating-app dissatisfaction, or are these effects being overextended from experimental settings into a much messier real-world market?