Stefano Palminteri
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stepalminteri.bsky.social
Stefano Palminteri
@stepalminteri.bsky.social
1.5K followers 500 following 220 posts
Computational cognitive scientist interested in learning and decision-making in human and machiches
Research director of the Human Reinforcement Learning team
Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS)
Institut National de la Santé et Recherche Médicale (INSERM)
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stepalminteri.bsky.social
Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · Nov 26
🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Across seven incentivized experiments and a large reanalysis, we systematically manipulated the presence and type of post-choice feedback in repeated risky decisions to test whether feedback shapes behavior through learning mechanisms or through anticipatory changes in preferences.
Across seven incentivized experiments and a large reanalysis, we systematically manipulated the presence and type of post-choice feedback in repeated risky decisions to test whether feedback shapes behavior through learning mechanisms or through anticipatory changes in preferences.
February 5, 2026 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Very happy that @PNASNews agreed to publish our (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social) response to Prakhar's thought-provoking study! You can find the final version at the link below. See the following tweet for Prakhar's response to our response. Happy to hear your thoughts!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
February 3, 2026 at 8:41 PM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Very happy that @PNASNews agreed to publish our (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social) response to Prakhar's thought-provoking study! You can find the final version at the link below. See the following tweet for Prakhar's response to our response. Happy to hear your thoughts!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
February 3, 2026 at 8:41 PM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
I had a great time in Cambridge, great people, great science and lovely place. Thanks a lot to @orbenamy.bsky.social @georgiaturner.bsky.social @sjblakemore.bsky.social
January 31, 2026 at 9:12 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
lovely walk and chat with a great mentor and friend
January 28, 2026 at 6:03 PM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
🧵 New paper in @NatureComms
Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences
Nasioulas, Potier, Cerrotti, Lebreton & me (2026)
Does feedback really improve risky decision-making? Short answer: no! it changes attitudes, not learning. 👇
rdcu.be/e0VcO
Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences
Nature Communications - Normative theory predicts that feedback should not affect decisions under risk, but past findings disagree. Here, the authors show that feedback shifts risk-taking by...
rdcu.be
January 27, 2026 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
I’ve started posting on Medium, sharing pieces that sit between academic writing and a broader audience. Topics will likely include decision science, AI, and the history & philosophy of science. First article is up (link below).
medium.com/@stefano.pal...
Stefano Palminteri – Medium
Read writing from Stefano Palminteri on Medium. Behavioral and computational scientist interested in understanding how humans and machines make decisions and in the history and philosophy of science.
medium.com
January 26, 2026 at 11:18 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
I’ve started posting on Medium, sharing pieces that sit between academic writing and a broader audience. Topics will likely include decision science, AI, and the history & philosophy of science. First article is up (link below).
medium.com/@stefano.pal...
Stefano Palminteri – Medium
Read writing from Stefano Palminteri on Medium. Behavioral and computational scientist interested in understanding how humans and machines make decisions and in the history and philosophy of science.
medium.com
January 26, 2026 at 11:18 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
A revised version of our (@bsgarcia.bsky.social +Crystal Qian) paper “A Moral Turing Test to assess how subjective belief and objective source affect detection and agreement with LLM judgments” is now available on PsyArXiv

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Screenshot of the abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-making systems—such as au-tonomous vehicles and medical devices—understanding how humans perceive and evaluate AI-generatedjudgements is crucial. To investigate this, we conducted a series of experiments in which participants evaluatedjustifications for moral and non-moral choices, generated either by humans or LLMs. Participants attempted toidentify the source of each justification (either human or LLM) and indicated their agreement with its content.We found that while detection accuracy was consistently above chance, it remained below 70%. In terms ofagreement, there was no overall preference for human-generated responses, even though machine-generatedjustifications were favored in particularly challenging moral scenarios. Notably, we observed a systematic anti-AIbias: participants were less likely to agree with judgments they believed were AI-generated, regardless of thetrue source. Linguistic cues, such as response length, typos, first-person pronouns, and cost-benefit languagemarkers (e.g., “lives,” “save”), influenced both detection and agreement. Participants tended to disagree withcost-benefit calculations, possibly due to an expectation that AI would favor such reasoning. These findingshighlight the influence of motivated belief and ingroup/outgroup bias in shaping human evaluation of AI-generatedcontent, particularly in morally sensitive contexts.
January 15, 2026 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
alishiravand.bsky.social
🌊🎉 Our project has been selected among the Top 10 projects for the Allianz Climate Risk Award 2025 and is now featured in the official Allianz Climate Risk Award Compendium!

🔗 The fragile pact: resilience at the edge of scarcity (p.18)
www.allianz.com/content/dam/...

It's a thread 🧵
January 8, 2026 at 2:00 PM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Excited to announce our symposium on how AI and humans shape each other
“Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual Influences”
9 Jan at ENS Paris.
Free registration here www.eventbrite.com/e/humans-and...
January 6, 2026 at 8:58 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
dirkwulff.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint 🚨

We present the decisions-from-experience database (DfE-DB), including data from 168 studies.

The data are currently shared with the original authors and made public upon publication.

🔗 Database: github.com/dwulff/dfe-db
🔗 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
December 19, 2025 at 10:56 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Here is the link to (freely) sign-up for our symposium!

Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual influences, for better and for worse

www.eventbrite.com/e/humans-and...
December 15, 2025 at 10:54 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Excited to announce our symposium on how AI and humans shape each other
“Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual Influences”
9 Jan at ENS Paris.
Talks by @smfleming.bsky.social, Valeria Giardino, Silvia Tulli, @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Laurence Devillers & @summerfieldlab.bsky.social .
Program ↓
December 10, 2025 at 10:40 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
In a recent thought-provoking study, @benjwagner.bsky.social & co claim that behavioural signatures attributed to context-dependent RL “are very well explained by habit-like action repetition”.
I obviously disagree and this thread explains what evidence backs my belief (thread 👇) 1/n
December 7, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Prakhar, in a recent thought-provoking paper and thread, boldly claimed that the learning-rate biases may be mere “statistical ghosts” of decaying learning rates
We took up the challenge and put this claim to the test. Here are our findings (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social). 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Genuine Learning Biases Persist After Accounting for Temporally Decreasing Learning Rates: insight from fitting six datasets. Recent claims suggest that learning-rate asymmetries observed in human reinforcement learning may be artefactual, arising from a failure to account for temporally decreasing learning rates in Bayes-optimal agents. Here, we re-analyzed six datasets and found that models incorporating learning biases systematically outperformed both Bayes-derived and decay-based models, and that learning biases persisted even when temporal decay was explicitly included. These results demonstrate that temporally decreasing learning rates cannot account for learning asymmetries, which instead emerge as robust and reproducible features of human reinforcement learning.
December 7, 2025 at 11:56 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Prakhar, in a recent thought-provoking paper and thread, boldly claimed that the learning-rate biases may be mere “statistical ghosts” of decaying learning rates
We took up the challenge and put this claim to the test. Here are our findings (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social). 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Genuine Learning Biases Persist After Accounting for Temporally Decreasing Learning Rates: insight from fitting six datasets. Recent claims suggest that learning-rate asymmetries observed in human reinforcement learning may be artefactual, arising from a failure to account for temporally decreasing learning rates in Bayes-optimal agents. Here, we re-analyzed six datasets and found that models incorporating learning biases systematically outperformed both Bayes-derived and decay-based models, and that learning biases persisted even when temporal decay was explicitly included. These results demonstrate that temporally decreasing learning rates cannot account for learning asymmetries, which instead emerge as robust and reproducible features of human reinforcement learning.
December 7, 2025 at 11:56 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
In a recent thought-provoking study, @benjwagner.bsky.social & co claim that behavioural signatures attributed to context-dependent RL “are very well explained by habit-like action repetition”.
I obviously disagree and this thread explains what evidence backs my belief (thread 👇) 1/n
December 7, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
I’m happy to share a short opinion piece I’ve just finished, where I revisit the famous Skinner vs. Chomsky exchange on how language is learned through the lens of today’s large language models (before getting mad read the rest) 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...
GPT style cartoon of a debate between a smiling Skinner and a angry Chomsky, while in the back, a robot is reading "verbal behavior"
December 3, 2025 at 10:22 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
I’m happy to share a short opinion piece I’ve just finished, where I revisit the famous Skinner vs. Chomsky exchange on how language is learned through the lens of today’s large language models (before getting mad read the rest) 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...
GPT style cartoon of a debate between a smiling Skinner and a angry Chomsky, while in the back, a robot is reading "verbal behavior"
December 3, 2025 at 10:22 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
November 26, 2025 at 11:38 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Wow — thanks to this amazing community (you! 🥰 ), our book is now #1 among Amazon’s “Hot New Releases” in Medical Cognitive Psychology! 🙏🤩

Pre-order here: shorturl.at/Dxbif
The picture represents a screenshot of the Amazon website where you can see that the book (Decision Making: a Very Short Introduction) is first in the category "amazon hot new releases". The second and the third books are also visible
November 27, 2025 at 9:36 AM
stepalminteri.bsky.social
🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif
November 26, 2025 at 11:38 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
Our latest preprint where we show (among other things!) that the main effect of complete feedback information is increase risk (not performance) in experience-based show. We also show that the description experience gap is not due to sampling issue
osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 18, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Stefano Palminteri
stepalminteri.bsky.social
"Adaptive biases in the wild: Advancing our understanding of the nature of biases"
The introduction (by Jochen Reb, Natalia Karelaia & Tomás Lejarraga )to the "Mind and Society" special issue on "adaptive biases" I had the pleasure to contribute to
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Adaptive biases in the wild: Advancing our understanding of the nature of biases - Mind & Society
Bias is most often seen as a flaw: people are said to “suffer” from biases and need to be “debiased.” Yet a bias, defined simply as a systematic deviation from a norm or standard, can in principle hav...
link.springer.com
November 18, 2025 at 8:44 AM