Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

For this reason, we wrote this comment, published yesterday. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... We reason that 1) their data supports rather than rejects the sequence hypothesis, as monkeys and chimps did not perform with any precision in these sequential tasks. 7/n

Join us for this talk by @janhaaker.bsky.social on "A functional view on how we respond to others’ pain: Empathy, threat learning and neuropeptides" 11 November, 1pm CET tu-dresden.de/mn/psycholog...

Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory? In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions. 🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Very thought-provoking post by @prakhargodara.bsky.social. Is confirmation bias/positivity bias a statistical "ghost" of model specification? Specifically not including temporally decaying learning rates? The evidence suggests this is not the case and here is why (1/n)

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

Which processes underlie collective intelligence in naturalistic human groups? In new work led by Valerii Chirkov, we show that payoff selectivity is key in transforming a group of individuals into an intelligent collective 🤝🧠 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY7n... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

"Dunbar's Number" is a zombie that lives forever in the science press it seems. Estimates of Dunbar's Number with 95% intervals, for a range of model specifications (from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... ):

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏

Am slowly making my way through this paper. And it is an impressive body of work by a collection of great researchers. However, I have a couple of problems with it... 1/n

The result of this super cool work with Henrik Olsson, @abhishekr0y.bsky.social, @hdschulze.bsky.social, Stan Rhodes, and Alison Mansheim can now be found online - and we hope you like it as much as we do 😍https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00053-z- Core ideas also summarized below 🔽

🚨Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨 We explore the use of cognitive theories/models with real-world data for understanding mental health. We review emerging studies and discuss challenges and opportunities of this approach. With @yaelniv.bsky.social and @eriknook.bsky.social Thread ⬇️

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

🚨New preprint🚨 osf.io/preprints/ps... In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD

New paper in NHB 📄🚨 We ran extensive experiments to show that making the rules of some canonical economic games looser, makes people more cooperative www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media. 🧵 Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited? It turns out, yes!

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

📢 New preprint! How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

@helenamiton.bsky.social and I have a new paper out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Past theories focus on how we evolve complex technologies (jet engines), but neglect cultural innovations that help us operate these technologies (pilot checklist) Paper has tons of examples and new theory!

🎊 New paper out! In this @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Forum, we (with @lucasmolleman.bsky.social and @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social) summarize how reward learning can lead to adaptive social learning. We also explore the broader consequences for cultural evolution: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🚄

Ever wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)

The funny thing is animals actually can suffer and we slaughter them by the billions but sure let’s have an existential panic over whether a software program screams when we turn it off

⚡ Autumn 2025 Cooperation Colloquia ⚡ We are excited to announce the next run of Cooperation Colloquia. With @talbotmandrews.bsky.social, @setayeshradkani.bsky.social, @kris-smith.bsky.social, @alexmesoudi.com, & more. Every second Friday, 15:00 CE(S)T Sign up here: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions? In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

🚨 PhD Position at the University of Amsterdam 🚨 Join my team as a computer scientist / computational social scientist working on LLMs, social media, and politics. We offer freedom, impact, and an inspiring environment at one of Europe's leading universities. 🔗 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

A bit late on this, but here we explore how cultural information can guide development of behavior & cognitive skills just like genes. Can cultural evolution result in teaching trajectories that promote incremental acquisition of complex tasks? #culturalevolution #developmentalpsychology #modelling

🧠 Want to integrate cultural evolution into your course using award winning materials created by the field's experts, and get paid $2000 to do it? 💵 🚨 The Cultural Evolution Society is seeking applications for the ACE Teaching Innovation Awards. 🔖 Apply here: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

🚨🚨 New preprint 📜 with Mathieu Charbonneau (@matcharbonneau.bsky.social‬): Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution (arxiv.org/abs/2508.04828). Feedback welcomed! #Evolution #Technology #Culture #OpenEnded #TechnologicalEvolution #CulturalEvolution 🧵: 1/29

📣 New registered report in @nathumbehav.nature.com with Ivan Soraperra, @jonathanschulz.bsky.social, and Shaul Shalvi: rdcu.be/eAcMA With data from 7,978 participants in 20 countries, we find that information about negative externalities promotes prosociality, especially in guilt-prone individuals.

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

New paper out in Topics in Cognitive Science! "Open-Ended Technological Evolution: The Co-Evolution of Invention and Cognitive Technologies" 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

1/10 Finally out in Proceedings B @royalsociety.org ! This took a while—big scope, many hands. We started with a worry: maybe Solomon’s paradox (doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535400) is “too obvious.” If stepping back helps wise choices, surely everyone does it… right?

5/ 🏛 Part 3 – RL in public policy Despite being central in education, therapy & even marketing, RL is oddly underused in behavioral public policy compared to “nudges” or “boosts.” We argue history & misconceptions are partly to blame.

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

Deadline tomorrow!

Deadline on Monday the 11th! Exciting project for people interested in social learning / cultural evolution.

We need data, not guesses, on how future tech may reshape behavior & society. Our new paper with @azimshariff.bsky.social and @iyadrahwan.bsky.social out in @nature.com spells out a framework we call the ❝science fiction science method❞ (sci-fi-sci) + www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💥New postdoc position! 💥 Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution. Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social 📍 Stockholm More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

Companion piece in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social to our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper, in which we put our "Social feature learning" model of social learning strategies in context.

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning. Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

Finally an interesting attempt to clean up the mess of social learning strategies! I’ll read after holidays :)

If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of our reward learning account of social learning—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—check out our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...