Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Northeastern University (Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory / Morality Lab); Boston College
- Orientation: Predictive processing and allostasis applied to social cognition and morality; Barrett-lineage constructionism
Key contributions
- Lead author of the ‘sense of should’ framework: derives social pressure, conformity, and norm-following from the metabolic cost of prediction error and allostasis, running the interoception→affect machinery outward into social cognition.
- Introduces ‘interactive inference’ — an embodied, trial-and-error account of how one brain infers another’s unobservable expectations — as the constructive counterpart to Barrett’s mental-inference-fallacy.
- Coins the stabilizing-influence / directing-influence distinction and models the equivalence of the sense of should with economic guilt-aversion (Chang et al. 2011).
Key papers
- Theriault et al. (2021) — Theriault, Young & Barrett (2021), Physics of Life Reviews 36:100–136. The framework paper.
- Theriault, J. E., & Young, L. (2014). Taking an ‘intentional stance’ on moral psychology. In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind. (Cited in the 2021 paper for the intentional/mechanical-stance discussion.)
- Theriault, J. E., Waytz, A., Heiphetz, L., & Young, L. (under review, cited 2021). Theory of Mind network activity is associated with metaethical judgment. PsyArXiv.
Connections
- Debates: Do discrete emotions map onto distinct brain regions or networks?
- Related researchers: Lisa Feldman Barrett
Lead author of Theriault, Young & Barrett (2021), the wiki’s first source on social pressure as a biological phenomenon. Trained in the Barrett/Young orbit at Northeastern and Boston College — the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (Barrett) and the Morality Lab (Liane Young) — his contribution is to take the constructionist, allostatic account of the body budget and point it at other people.
The one idea, and why it matters here
The wiki met Barrett’s framework as an account of emotion (Theory of constructed emotion) grounded in Allostasis and Interoception. Theriault’s move is to notice that other people are the largest unpredictable part of a human’s environment, and that — because prediction error is metabolically costly (Metabolic cost of prediction error) — the same body budget that explains emotion also explains why we conform: conforming keeps others predictable, and predictability is cheap. The felt version of that motive is the Sense of should. This is the first time the wiki’s interoception machinery is used to derive a social motivation rather than a feeling.
His second contribution, Interactive inference, is the constructive answer to a problem Barrett’s The mental inference fallacy raises but does not solve: if you cannot read a mind off behaviour, how is it inferred? Theriault’s answer — form a hypothesis from priors, act, and read the resulting prediction error (and its affective signal) as evidence — keeps the embodied/interoceptive commitment while giving mental inference a mechanism.
Convention note
Given a page under the wiki’s load-bearing-figure convention (as with Rainer Schandry, Edward Katkin, Anke Ehlers) because he is the framework’s architect and first author, and because his own prior work (Theriault & Young 2014; Theriault et al. under review) is cited within the paper as load-bearing. Co-author Liane Young (Morality Lab, Boston College) is held to the co-author convention and given no page — a frequent collaborator here, but not independently load-bearing in the wiki’s current sources. Barrett is senior author and already has a page.