Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capita... #smbc

This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go. youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...

Happy to see this work published in Psych Review. It's an impressive and important bit of theory/modeling about how we learn about decision-making under risk. Here's a slide with the super-coarse-grained summary of our results. Read the paper for (much) more. osf.io/preprints/so...

I am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so... @psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

📣 Job alert! *Assistant Prof in Computational Social Science*. We're a friendly department, with sharp students, at a great institution, in a lovely city. We have real strengths in computational social science & are looking for a colleague to build this further. Share and reach out with quesions!

📢 Apply to our (2-year) research fellowships at @iast.fr Join a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and indisciplinary group of scholars in Toulouse, walkable/cyclable pink city of chocolatines in the South of France. Deadline: November 15, 2025. www.iast.fr/research-fel...

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

New preprint w/ Nathan Gabriel & @avbell.bsky.social: The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies The model tackles multiple nested/overlapping identities and complex signaling structure. Recovers lots of old results and adds several new ones osf.io/preprints/so...

Job announcement 🚨: paid fieldwork opportunity with Sanguatsiniq research project! Details in thread ⬇️ Please share!

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Here's the stable link to the most recent version 👀 osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 I looked at 400+ years of cumulative cultural evolution in the Game of Go from feudalism to superhuman AI. Did AlphaGo etc. completely disrupt human play? No! More like human-machine convergence, rather than revolution. Check out these decision trees! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Merced River, Yosemite National Park

Week 7 of my Bayes stats course, now deep in multilevel models, correlated effects, centered and non-centered parameterizations, diag(σ)LZ ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn (link to lectures: github.com/rmcelreath/s...)

We are gutting EIS and our general capacity to respond to novel infectious threats right as bird flu is ramping up. What could possibly go wrong? www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

In game theory, we often assume that people only interact in one game at a time. In a new paper, we explore theoretically and experimentally how people cooperate when they engage in two games concurrently, either with the same partner or with different partners, www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Where do moralizing religions come from? Useless cognitive by-products?Cultural group selection for complex societies? Our Psych Review paper argues: neither. Let’s rethink their cognitive & evolutionary origins🧵 w/ @manvir.bsky.social @nbaumard @jbaptistandre.bsky.social doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Looking for a first intro to theoretical models in cultural evolution? For yourself or your students? 🔍 In our chapter for an upcoming @ehbea.bsky.social textbook, we outline what models are for, what questions they address, and how they can be coded in R! Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Postdoc position available in our team! We are testing a computational model explaining the decision-making process during in normative/moral situations while incorporating the formative role of culture in this process. www.muni.cz/en/about-us/... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky #cogpsyc

💥Two 💥 post-doc positions open in my @erc.europa.eu ERC-funded group. In an interdisciplinary, collaborative setting, we use different types of modeling (e.g., reinforcement learning) and human experiments to understand social learning and cultural evolution. Get in touch if you have any questions!

Does poverty lead to risk taking or risk avoidance? Turns out, to both. Our new paper (with D. Nettle & W. Frankenhuis) in @royalsocietypublishing.org explains why, and conducts preregistered tests of our ‘desperation threshold’ model. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... A 🧵

Andy Whiten and I wrote a @science.org perspective about a cool new study from @inbalarnon.bsky.social @simonkirby.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social et al! They found humpback whale song has language-like statistical structure, using methods inspired by infant language learning 🐋🎶 Links below ⬇️

We're hiring! Are you a cultural evolutionary modeller who wants to understand how and why children's peer cultures evolve? Here's a postdoc position for you! @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @durhampsych.bsky.social @ehbea.bsky.social @eslr.bsky.social Apply here: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Lovely blog post about our recent paper in Ornithology (@amornith.bsky.social)! We applied agent-based models and machine learning to 36 yrs of mourning warbler song, and found evidence that males have a learning bias for more complex syllables: americanornithology.org/cultural-evo...

Do whales optimize their vocalizations for efficiency, just like human language? 🐋🎶 My latest study in Science Advances (@science.org) suggests they do—following linguistic laws seen in human speech. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

🏰 PhD position on computational modelling | collective dynamics | cultural evolution 🏰 Get in touch with any questions you might have and join me in beautiful Marburg! stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/c... (Deutsch) stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/3... (English)

"It's us vs them." Is it always? …and if it isn’t, when might it be them = us, or even them > us?? In a new paper, Cody Ross and I find that perceived cooperativeness and need can flip the equation. Here’s a thread 👇🏻 and here’s the paper: doi.org/10.1017/ehs.... /1

Good words to remember when things are falling apart...

Alt-librarians, alt-IT? This is definitely the best way to thank them. archive.org/donate They are never flush with enough money to thrive.

My former PhD @dominikdeffner.bsky.social is now a professor and is looking for a PhD student. Know someone who would fit? stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/3...

"The Special Feature 'Half a Century of Cultural Evolution' assembles answers from a broad array of scientific disciplines with vastly different views on culture, but with one uniting theme: that culture evolves." Open access www.pnas.org/topic/565

It seems like a fitting, if dark, day to publish a paper on the adaptive value of parochialism. doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

I generally enjoy reviewing papers, especially in interdisciplinary venues, but the increasing number of method-in-search-of-a-problem papers is unfortunate. Especially since the methods are now complex Rube-Goldberg machines made out of LLMs.

A colleague today asked about Gaussian Processes on a sphere. Like spatial autocorrelation on the globe. I asked @avehtari.bsky.social. There are papers! This problem common enough to be worth having a case study I think? (1) Theory doi.org/10.1007/s112... (2) Application doi.org/10.48550/arX...

New paper in #ProcB with @alexmesoudi.com, @jfbonnefon.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social and Rob Boyd. We investigate how social learning shapes the way we explore and show that it can even preserve useless theories! 🧵👇

Really happy that my good friend Petr got this award! 👏 👏👏

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!