Form Approved Through 09/30/2011 OMB No.

0925-0002
Department of Health and Human Services (Applicant completes this block.)
Public Health Service NAME OF APPLICANT (Last, first, middle initial)
Pietraszewski
Reference
Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award PROPOSED SPONSORING INSTITUTION
Individual Fellowship Yale University
Compare the applicant with other individuals of similar training and experience with whom you have been associated. Use
the following numerical scores, from 1 (best) to 5 (poorest). Mark every block; insert “X” if insufficient knowledge to rate
and “NA” if not applicable.
1 Comparable to the best individual in a current class or research laboratory (upper 5%)
2 Upper 6 to 20% 4 Middle 41 to 60%
3 Upper 21 to 40% 5 Lower 40%

Use black ink.

1 Research Ability and Potential 1 Originality

2 Written and Verbal Communications 2 Accuracy

1 Perseverance in Pursuing Goals 2 Scientific Background

1 Self-Reliance and Independence 1 Familiarity with Research Literature

NA Clinical Proficiency, if relevant 1 Ability to Organize Scientific Data

2 Laboratory Skills and Techniques, if relevant

Describe your association with the applicant. Comment on the above items, including other areas as appropriate, identifying the strengths and
weaknesses that should be considered in evaluating the applicant’s potential for a research career.

Dr Dave Pietraszewski, completed his PhD here at UCSB, under the supervision of Leda Cosmides and
John Tooby, in June of 2009. I write as a member of Dave's doctoral committee, as well as having
collaborated with him on one of his more recent projects.

Dr Pietraszewski is a talented and brilliant young scientist, who worked on a variety of questions in his time
at UCSB, primarily tackling them from an evolutionary perspective. He conducting a carefully constructed
and programmatic series of studies seeking to identify elements of a hypothesized 'coalitional' psychology. I
first met Dave during lab meetings run by his advisors, and from the outset I was very impressed during his
presentations to the group and his sure grasp of the theoretical issues he was tackling. His insightful
comments during the presentations of others' was also notable and impressive -- oftentimes, a question he
would ask early in the proceedings would turn out to be the key question about which much of the later
discussion centered.

His research work encompasses a very impressive series of datasets which address questions of coalitional
encoding and representation, and though I know you will hear more about this work from other letter writers,
I'll summarize briefly why I think that these contributions are evidence that Dr Pietraszewski s an exceptional
mind, a careful researcher, and has extreme promise to become on the leaders in his field. The work follows
from a finding that certain kinds of information coalitions that might be able to reduce what has been thought
to be 'automatic' race encoding in people's social categorization. Following the Kurzban et al's finding that
antagonistic coalitional information reduced people's tendency to make within race errors in a "who said
what?" task (an implicit measure of whether race has been encoded or not), Dr Pietraszeski set out to test
cooperative coalitional cues and found the same pattern of reduced race encoding. A host of other
interesting and important findings have been added. Notably, he has showed that encoding of coalitions
does not require visible coalitional markers (e.g. colored jerseys) -- the same pattern of results obtains if the
coalition membership can be inferred from the conversation that takes place between the group members.
Also, in a very clever manipulation, he showed that the effect of coalitional cues on reducing race encoding
happens at recall rather than at encoding -- if race information is primed as important to coalition after initial
information has been encoded, then it should only be able restore categorization by race if the race
information is already somewhere in the system (i.e. was encoded in the first place) -- which is in fact the
pattern of results he found.

Dave has used similar methods to address another potential cue to coalition -- hearing a speaker with a non-
native accent. This information however, according to Dave's analysis and evidence, is treated by the mind
not just as a cue to coalition membership but rather as a dedicated feature of social categorization, and is
automatically encoded and therefore 'immune' to manipulations of coalition. More recent investigations have
moved Dave into studies using measures of coalitional thinking that he regards as more ecologically valid,
such as the way that people might use patterns of accent, friendship, and so on to predict instances of
cooperation and/or conflict among triads of individuals (a measure borrowed from experimental
anthropology). As a whole, the work is already an impressive body of evidence that shows a careful and
programmatic approach to research, where the devil is in the details of the data, and where an ability to
organize the coordinated conclusions from lots of sources of evidence is paramount. Dave has this ability, it
is rare and difficult if not impossible to teach, and it will surely make him one day one of the most effective
contributors of solid evidence and carefully constructed theory in his cohort. He truly has the potential to be a
great research scientist.

The work on coalitions brought him also to seek a collaboration with me in order to test some of these ideas
using a developmental approach, and though new to the nuts and bolts of engaging in developmental work,
Dave had by this time (we started work on this project last year) already been a long term attendee at my lab
meetings, and a useful participant and contributor to all our discussions. He had a acquired a good sense of
the kinds of methodologies and control tasks that work in this population and that make for data sets from
which one can draw stronger conclusions. He genuinely has a gift for this kind of reasoning. Dave did not
need much in the way of guidance, and it was a pleasure working with him developing the materials,
dependent measures and control conditions for our study looking at preschoolers' inferences about
friendship. The methods were based on children hearing stories about two dyads sharing a friendship
(versus simply sharing a classroom) and one from each pair getting involved in an altercation. We simply
asked children about whether mental states that those involved in the altercation might feel toward one
another (e.g. x1 is mad at y1) would extend to their friends (e.g. "is x2 mad at y2?"). The results showed the
pattern of inferences one might expect; with mental states extending to friends (but not to mere classmates).
An important control condition showed that these inferences are appropriately restricted -- children do not
extend any internal states that might be shared by those directly involved in an event (e.g. getting dizzy after
going on a playground ride) across friends. This has been a fun and important topic to work on. Dave is
currently working on the manuscript which we will be submitting shortly, and I am delighted to see that the
project that he has submitted for this fellowship follows nicely from the work that came from our
collaboration. At Yale, he has found an excellent position and environment in which to acquire additional
sets of skills, and further develop his potential. The proposal shows the same clarity and insight, as well as
the same programmatic approach that I came to appreciate as a member of his dissertation committee. He
is already beginning to establish his potential as a gifted researcher and is, in my mind, very much the kind
of researcher for whom the NRSA positions were designed.

In sum, De Pietraszewski has an exceptionally sharp mind and will be an invaluable contributor to the
intellectual environment wherever he ends up working. He has developed a good sense of experimental
methodology and conducts careful, precise and thorough research. He will truly one day be a leader in his
field.

DATES ASSOCIATED WITH APPLICANT CAPACITY AT THAT TIME (Teacher, dissertation advisor, supervisor, or
Sep 2002-present other)
Dissertation committee member and collaborator
RESPONDENT (Name, title, department, and institution)
Tamsin German, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara
TELEPHONE NUMBER DATE
805-893-8018 12/2/09
PHS 416-1 (Rev. 9/08) Reference Page