Closing date: 30/09/2025
Application link: lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

Thanks Michael - that is a paper of ours but our present response is in reply to this one: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yeah that’s really bizarre I’m getting a 503 error when I click it too… seems to be an issue with psyarxiv generally as I can’t seem to get into the main site either. Hopefully will resolve soon

It’s all laid out in the response - as we’ve always said, explaining social cognitive phenomena and including the contribution of general neural processes can be completed in the same breath.

We also don't demand social specific processes: this is a misreading as we mention. We say that formally capturing social _phenomena_ is useful to account for a range of phenomena in the clinic. Again, if you can find where we deny the importance of lower level processes i;d be keen to see it

The key advantage of having formal approaches that capture social phenomena is that you can more closely bridge levels of explanation and not have to resort to correlations between lower level signal and higher level noise. We outline this here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

An analogy: why bother having a model of individual neurons if you know everything is made of atoms? Signal at one level of explanation may be best predicted by different formal approaches, that is absolutely not denying the contribution of signal at lower levels of a hierarchy.

In any case, I hope this response clears up any ambiguity

I mean again I’d be keen to see which bit you’re referring to exactly. In our own personal exchanges you also know I’ve strongly pushed back against that interpretation. It was a surprise to see your perspective given our recent conversations!