Regular biography
Julian Jara-Ettinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yale University. His research focuses on understanding the mechanisms that enable complex human social behaviors, including fairness, linguistic communication, gesture, moral reasoning, and pedagogy. His work integrates computational modeling, eye-tracking, cross-cultural research, and developmental studies to explore how social intelligence emerges and develops. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Yale University.
Scholar-generated biography
Julian Jara-Ettinger is an Associate Professor at Yale University, specializing in Cognitive Science, Communication, Computational Modeling, Language, and Social Cognition. His research explores how humans attribute beliefs, desires, and percepts to others, focusing on the computational principles underlying commonsense psychology and mentalizing. He investigates how language and communication reflect cognitive processes, including color naming, number perception, and the role of expected utility in action understanding. His work also examines children's reasoning about rational action and the social basis of referential communication. Jara-Ettinger's research bridges developmental psychology, computational modeling, and linguistic theory to uncover universal and uniquely human aspects of cognition.