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...

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.

Great explainer for our new @nathumbehav.nature.com paper!

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm hiring 2+ 2.5-year postdocs over the next few months. Job 1: looking for someone with deep expertise in computational modelling (reinforcement learning, agent based modelling) on real-world/complex data (closing: 18 August, starting: October-December), www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52059/

Thinking about writing a pop science book about the brain (“Your Brain on Everything”) where the big reveal is that all the brain names were randomized and I was actually talking about psychology the whole time.

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

New paper led by my former student Peter Steiglechner. We introduced a model of dynamic opinion perception that accounts for social identity, and use data on German climate opinions to show how subject perceptions of polarization can differ from opinion polls. osf.io/preprints/so...

👩‍🎓 Work in Sweden: The Institute for Analytical Sociology offers 2 fully funded PhD positions! liu.se/en/work-at-l...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Experimental Evidence for the Propagation and Preservation of Machine Discoveries in Human Populations arxiv.org/abs/2506.17741 with team members @levinbrinkmann.bsky.social @thomasfmueller.bsky.social Ann-Marie Nussberger, @maximederex.bsky.social, Sara Bonati, Valerii Chirkov

💥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

🌟 Research Assistant opportunity 🌟 I'm looking for an RA to support research @thechbh.bsky.social on social information seeking and decision making, including fMRI and MEG 🧠 Details: tinyurl.com/chbh-ra-uob Deadline: 20th July ⏳ Start: From September 🗓️ Please share 🔁

Karolinska Institutet is now advertising 20 Assistant Professor positions. One of them focus on AI in brain and behavior. If you quit, apply and come work with us! 🙂

🤩IT'S A PREPRINT 😍 Adolescents' social sensitivity isn't a bad thing—it's adaptive! In our new study, led by amazing Andrea Gradassi @connectedmindslab.bsky.social, we show that teens learned to copy successful peers faster than adults in a new multiplayer exploration task. osf.io/preprints/os...