Just in time for the start of next week's Braitenberg 100 symposium, I'm excited to share "Dopamine: From prediction to error," a site I built to better understand where the dopamine RPE hypothesis came from and where it might be headed. efharkin.com/s/dopamine-h... 1/3

The confirmed programme of the lecture series on Foundations and Frontiers of Analytical Sociology is now available online. The lectures will take place between September 2 and December 11, 2026. Please find the full programme, and short bios of the lecturers here: liu.se/en/news-item...

New preprint led by @lucasmolleman.bsky.social investigates social information use across the human lifespan. Testing >40,000 participants aged 6-80 in museums in Berlin and Japan. psyarxiv.com/hec96

LLMs are used widely in the behavioral sciences. But we have no good standards for how to do so. We introduce a consensus-based reporting checklist to improve transparency, reproducibility and ethical accountability of LLM-based research in the behavioural sciences. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals🧪 www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Suggests wild chimpanzees use peering to learn a wide variety of skills, thereby highlighting unrecognized cultural potential in everyday behaviors.

"The Cultural Ecology of Social Media" is finally out! This article put together a series of thoughts I had in the past years, and that found a productive theoretical background in the ecological approach to culture developed by Baumard and André. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Two poster presentations from my group at #sbdm2026 in Paris. Magdalena Soukupová on the social learning mechanisms of human goal selection and @pierreledenmat.bsky.social on (lack of) mentalizing in social learning.

Semantic knowledge is key for human innovation and cultural evolution! Our paper (thread in repost), led by fantastic @anilyaman.bsky.social & rising star @ts-brain.bsky.social is out in @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... I will present this work at APS Barcelona (29/5), happy to chat!

Popularity Feedback Constrains Innovation in Cultural Markets arxiv.org/abs/2602.09997 Come to my talks at CogSci and IC2S2 if you want to hear more about this project!

Awesome results from @fluketc.bsky.social @dudman.bsky.social and team, both for dopamine field and for all that train animals in tasks www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Autonomous AI agents are now built into many browsers. A naive user can take an online survey with as little as the click of a button. For behavioral research, which depends heavily on online samples, this is a real problem. (1/7)

🚨 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 🚨 1/ We invite proposals for posters and symposia for the New Directions in Social Media Research conference at St John’s College, University of Cambridge (7–8 Dec 2026). We especially welcome future-facing research on how the social world is changing in the digital age.

1/ I’m excited to share our new @NatureHumBehav paper “Social Functioning in Autism: A Systematic Review & Meta-analysis” 🧵We synthesized 35 yrs of autism research to ask a fundamental Question: How is social functioning organized, developed, and altered in autism? Free link: rdcu.be/figGl

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

For an early stage scientist: How to: Write an email Ask for a letter of recommendation Network Get new ideas Handle rejection Talk to reporters m.youtube.com/@NAChristakis

Postdoctoral Fellow in Agent-based Human–Earth System Modelling at the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Deadline: June 15. @brunelcce.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @durhamdcerc.bsky.social @michael.muthukrishna.com

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

For a year and a half, @carorowland.bsky.social, @lehersingh.bsky.social, Marisa Casillas, Shanley Allen, and I have been meeting to discuss whether innateness is still a useful concept to think about in studying language acquisition. Here's our take: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint w/ Valerio Rubino and Peter Dayan: how do people discover and use compositional structure under constraints? osf.io/preprints/ps... A key factor is a simple heuristic that favors reuse of repeated and symmetric fragments across scales, is robust to time pressure, and sped up RTs 🧵👇

Cognitive Modelling Research in the Era of Agentic Large Language Models From equations to fitted models in minutes: how LLMs are changing computational cognitive science and how we should adapt My latest post on Medium medium.com/@stefano.pal...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

Phil Trans Roy Soc B theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’ is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

Skinner’s central idea is that teaching should be treated as a domain in which we can deliberately design better learning environments. He develops the notions of a behavioral technology of education and of teaching machines as tools for organizing feedback, pacing, and practice more effectively.

📄 New preprint: The blessing and curse of Value-Shaping imitation (by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social) osf.io/preprints/ps... Imitation is central to human learning: but not all imitation processes are equally adaptive. We study their computational properties using reinforcement learning models.

There is a hidden curriculum for early career scientists. In a new vlog, we bring it to light: How to Have New Ideas (and "Oblique Strategies") How to Network as a Scientist How to ask for a Letter of Recommendation The Finish Line Moves The Long Reach of Things You Learn How to Write an Email

Many of us are worried about AI. Many are also interested in what it can tell us about the human mind. Can we separate out our concerns and our scientific curiosity? A topic discussed in our latest episode, w/ @glupyan.bsky.social & @mcxfrank.bsky.social! Listen: disi.org/what-can-ai-...

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...

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions. Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

New For the Love of Science vlog on creativity in science: How to Have New Ideas www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVD...

Measuring thresholds for individual change can improve social change interventions

Integrating behavioural experimental findings into dynamical models to inform social change interventions

How does the excitement of doing science shift as you do it more and more? The Finish Line Moves New For the Love of Science vlog youtu.be/je_vgNlr0q4

New blog post: The Phylogenetics of Artifacts — inferring the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms, and language models. From cat genetics to ancient myths to LLMs. 🧬 1/n

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence. w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk 🧠📈

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.