Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

How does social influence shape collective outcomes? When does it lead to lock-in on inferior options? In our 🚨 new preprint 📝 osf.io/preprints/so... we make three contributions w/ @alexgelas.bsky.social Alex Jochim @leostnbrk.bsky.social Peter Steiglechner & @pantelispa.bsky.social 🧵1/4

Come work with us! And get in touch with any questions you might have about the position, our labs or living/working in Germany #PostdocWanted

New preprint available about combinatorial invention! Reconstructing Combinatorial Inventions Through Design Problem Analysis osf.io/preprints/ps...

**Postdoc position in human category learning** @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social. www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

New preprint!! Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so... Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Why does a worse candidate win? Or an inferior song dominate? New article with @alexgelas.bsky.social, @pantelispa.bsky.social & Gaël Le Mens. We show that often once A becomes even slightly more popular than B, people choose A much more often. www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In today's modeling class I had a lot of fun trying to reconduce a bunch of different models to the update rule from rescorla wagner :-) it turns out that - at least for RL, bayesian update, kalman filters and hierarchically gaussian filters - it's "all" in the learning rate definition.

Here’s Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely asking Jeffrey Epstein for “the name and email of the redhead that was here with you.” This is four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

"Social media is like a Skinner box" is a phrase I've heard repeated a lot, but never meaningfully engaged with. We try and do so in this preprint. Behaviorist principles are very useful to understanding digital behavior, but work in this area tends not to be aware of them. So, we provide a primer.

Reward as drive reduction, the return! This opinion piece on the explanatory and unifying power of the homeostatic reinforcement learning framework is amazingly accessible, despite its technical nature, and extremely insightful 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal. Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📖Published! STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission This framework can be used to infer complex transmission rules🖥️ 🧪 Read more:

🎉 📣Join today at 1pm GMT to learn about ESLR and get involved!

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

On a more positive note, this NN is worth a read. It takes a similar approach to Ashwood, Calhoun etc to explore diff behavioral states using HMM, but here using a hierarchical Dirichlet process to infer number of states www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My co-authors and I are happy to present our framework "Collective Intelligence as Collective Information Processing (CIP)." Here we propose decomposing different information processing mechanisms to unify disparate phenomena traditionally classified as "collective intelligence."

🚨 New Paper Alert 🚨 "Understanding & Predicting Cultural Change" is accepted at Advances in Experimental Social Psychology! Varnum & I argue that Psychology cannot afford to be blind to time. We need to move from cross-sectional snapshots to dynamic time-series movies. 🧵👇

All I want for Christmas is for Sweden to revive its spooky Christmas goat tradition.

New preprint: "The Cultural Ecology of Social Media" osf.io/preprints/so... Thread ⬇️⬇️⬇️

"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology" royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

New paper out in Phil Trans with Angel Jimenez, Keith Jensen and Lei Chang From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution? royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Very grateful that our paper was awarded ISCON’s Best 2024 Paper in Social Cognition!! Huge thanks to the fantastic team: Ben Stillerman, @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social , @leorhackel.bsky.social , Damaris Hagen, Nils Jostmann, and @davidamodio.bsky.social 🎊💐

🚨Two postdoc positions @tse-fr.eu @iast.fr 🚨 We are recruiting two postdocs as part of the ANR-funded project ENFORCE. Join me, @giuliandr.bsky.social, & @zhgarfield.com, to study punitive systems across societies. Full time, 2 years, no teaching. Deadline: Jan 23 www.tse-fr.eu/groups/depar...

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN

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 ⬇️