vlad chituc
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, where I work with Laurie Santos. Psychologists often ask people to rate their subjective experience — on a scale from one to ten, how happy are you? how wrong would that be? how strongly are you feeling that emotion? My research draws from sensory psychophysics and information theory to understand what those numbers actually mean.
I finished my PhD in 2024 (also at Yale) where I worked with Brian Scholl, and my work was awarded the Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. I’ve written publicly for outlets like The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast.
select publications
, Crockett, M. J., & Scholl, B. J. (2025). How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment. Cognition.
, & Scholl, B. J. (2025). The El Greco fallacy, this time with feeling: How (not) to measure group differences in emotional intensity. Affective Science.
Everett, J. A. C., Colombatto, C., Awad, E., Boggio, P., Bos, B., Brady, W. J., Chawla, M., , … Crockett, M. J. (2021). Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis. Nature Human Behaviour.
, Henne, P., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & De Brigard, F. (2016). Blame, not ability, impacts moral “ought” judgments for impossible actions: Toward an empirical refutation of “ought” implies “can.” Cognition.
(unpublished manuscript). On the magic of 10 bits/s: A surprise constraint on the channel capacity of machine and human intelligence. Written as a response to this article in Neuron.