Jordan E. Theriault
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 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.