Too many star chefs spoil the broth. In an Overcooked-like task, mixed teams beat uniformly strong players. Fittingly, the project came from an interdisciplinary team: different fields, better recipe. Thanks all! We’ll present at CogSci. See y’all there. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

A small fraction of online actors exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and discusses. In a new paper, we trace how social media influencers turn fringe claims into viral narratives by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms & crowds osf.io/preprints/ps...

Ever thought we acquire generalizable knowledge by discarding details and compressing our experiences? In a new BBS paper, @sabinasloman.bsky.social and I argue otherwise, proposing a novel way of studying human learning inspired by double descent in ML. Disagree? Propose a commentary by May 15 :)

New preprint of a paper with Eunice Yiu to appear in Philosophical Transactions A, Special issue: World models, 2026. The theoretical link between empowerment in RL and Bayesian causal models with cool new data. arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

I love paying TurboTax a few hundred bucks every year to figure out how much money I owe the government, which the government already knows, but won't tell me because TurboTax pays legislators to keep the government from telling me. 😍

@michael.muthukrishna.com and I are hiring a postdoc to join our labs at NYU!  We're looking for someone excited to work on one of society's newly emerging and potentially generation-shaping challenges: the multi-agent alignment problem.

The paper, led by Eugina Leung, is here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We document that the human tendency for confirmation bias in question framing (the tendency of people to frame search in terms of their prior beliefs) and algorithms that optimize for relevance combine to impede belief updating.

The Causality in Cognition Lab -- a supportive, bluesky-colored team -- is looking for a predoc to join us! Here are infos about the lab (cicl.stanford.edu) and the position (careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/iriss-p...). The application deadline is May 1st. Please share, thank you 🙏

And another Quarto announcement; I've alluded to it before, but we're making it "official". We've started work on Quarto 2. The blog post has an overview: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... We'll share more in future blog posts, but here's what you can expect from the Quarto 2 dev effort: (1/)

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

The adaptations summarized in this figure enable us to use the population (or group) as an information storage system, with different costs and benefits than storing information in memory (or genes) of individuals. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient, intelligent reasoning. In a new working paper, @perfors.net and I discuss how our ability to reason from *social* information is one way that we achieve this capacity. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Great to see this finally out - I have been working on it since 2018, having carried out the first experiment for my undergrad dissertation research project!

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere! www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

CodaNote: Collaborative Markdown/Quarto/Rmarkdown People were looking for collaborating on MD family files with knit rendering... I built this tool for CORE team, works like Google Docs. Opened it to all from internal use so everyone can use it. Feedback welcome! Try: codanote.vercel.app

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

My colleague, Charles Perreault, has published cool new paper documenting impact of culture on human capacity for adaptation: http//www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2523038123

I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments. 📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026 Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)

Sycophantic AI distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs. "sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt." Unbiased sampling produces discovery rates 5X higher! arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14270

Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Postdoc positions at UC Berkeley, including with the fabulous Cultural Analytics group: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05222

Allow me to interrupt the daily doomscroll by bragging about one of my newly graduated PhD students, who just headed off to Berkeley. Manikya studies how we learn and reason from social information, particularly in online contexts like on social media, so give him a follow if those topics appeal!

Bit of a life update: After 4 wonderful years in Melbourne, yesterday I arrived in the US to start a postdoc at UC Berkeley with @wdt.bsky.social

...How these selective pressures create the forms of intelligence that different AIs show? How do they explain their features? Could we change the selective pressures to have the features we want more? Here, take also my take!

This looks useful - not just to improve how we control for learning effects during socio-cognitive tasks, but also to study how decisions (like face judgements) might change during the task itself. #neuroskyence

Part 7: My recommendations The previous parts have all been the meaty ones; in this I try to give some general suggestions for you – where “you” means everyone: students, parents, teachers, employees, scientists, policy-makers, people in charge, etc.

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Excited to share our new paper in Memory & Cognition! Consensus isn’t always what it seems. Repeated claims can create an illusion of consensus-making people feel as persuaded by a single echoed source as by independent corroboration.

This is the best paper I have read in ages (disclaimer: I haven't finshed reading, so I may end up hating it). I've been thinking a lot about very similar problems, so great to see somebody else doing all the hard work so I don't have to :)

Our new preprint on the FOODEEG open dataset is out! EEG recordings and behavioural responses on food cognition tasks for 117 participants will be made publicly available 🧠 @danfeuerriegel.bsky.social @tgro.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Writing is thinking Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

Most popular decision-making models assume that cognitive processes are static over time. In our new paper in Psych Review, we offer a simple extension to evidence accumulation models that lets researchers account for systematic changes in parameters across time 📈 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Hey #rstats and #stats people, does anyone know of any references that explain the hazards of trying to run or interpret models with all combinations of many predictors? (i.e., including multiple 2-way and 3-way interactions)

New in Science: Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Key from @jennyallen.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social: (1) important new paradigm (2) but not clear why results differ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

I am hiring a postdoc for a DFF-funded project on social influence, and the decision processes that fuel rich-get-richer dynamics in the online/offline world. The position is for up to a year, competitive Danish salary, remote work possible. Interested or know somebody? DM me or share!

🚨 #DECRA #DE26 announcement: ❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2026❗️ See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/285 /bot

The Center for an Informed Public is a bright spot in the current gloom about researching our modern information environment. Definitely encourage early career researchers from all sorts of disciplines to apply.

There is also a slight effect of the secondary source (such as the account posting the claim, as opposed to who is the source of the claim); people were more likely to share claims with an independent consensus, and least so for those with a dependent consensus with the same secondary source.

Next, @scondes.bsky.social is looking at whether repeated presentations of the claim from the same source compared to diverse sources is a vehicle of misinformation. Repetitions lead to greater confidence in the claims, and slightly moreso for those with diverse sources for the claim provided.

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

Hello fellow nerds! The upcoming Australasian Mathematical Psych Conference (AMPC) is going to be on Feb 23-25, and they've just put out the call for abstracts. Details below. This is one of my favourite conferences and this year it's in Singapore(!!) which should be awesome.

FYI, if you are using Zotero, koofr.eu provides a free 10 gb cloud with webdav that could be used for synchronizing pdfs. I tested it this week as I no longer have access to the server I used previously. Seems to work well. koofr.eu/blog/posts/k...

disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought @richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

Interested in how we make preference-driven decisions, and how this is implemented in the brain? We report that neural correlates of evidence accumulation (CPP, Mu/Beta) are also observed during value-based decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by @laurencf.bsky.social (Lauren Fong) 1/n

Hey memory folks! I got a question from a student I couldn't quite answer. I talked about consolidation, and how HM's loss of 3-5 years of recent memories led the field to believe that consolidation might take the same period of time. A student asked - "why would it take so long?"

Do AI agents ask good questions? We built “Collaborative Battleship” to find out—and discovered that weaker LMs + Bayesian inference can beat GPT-5 at 1% of the cost. Paper, code & demos: gabegrand.github.io/battleship Here's what we learned about building rational information-seeking agents... 🧵🔽