I link della settimana (#134) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

"Although quality data are sparse, the research that does exist suggests a different narrative—one in which kids are faring better in many ways than those of previous generations." www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

The World Happiness Report 2026 theme is social media and adolescent wellbeing, so I tried to have a read. It feels a mixed bag to me. They gave prominence to the view of Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, which tells about the framing, but there are also clearly more nuanced chapters.

I link della settimana (#133) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Cross-cultural analysis in non-industrial societies using eHRAF suggests toolmaking skill acquisition is mostly from kin (vs conformity or prestige) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

First guest lecture in my cultural analytics module! Thank you to Nadia von Jacobi, introducing a new ~27,000 folktales dataset, and testing presence of moral foundations themes. Preprint presenting the dataset: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Another proposal in line with "The cultural ecology of social media". Platforms reward engagement over accuracy: counter misinformation incentivising producers with a "Trust" button. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Online success on social media is increasingly a question of how well posts serve the poster’s strategic goals (reputation/identity management, coalition building) and less of pure content transmission (and reader psychology), argues @acerbialberto.com: buff.ly/fDUfOYU

Nice systematic review of how emotions affect engagements in social media. The effect is context- (e.g. negative bias in politics and positive in health) and platform-dependent. www.emerald.com/oir/article-...

I link della settimana (#132) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Another article proposing to integrate an evolutionary framework in sociology link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What about evaluating researchers/academics on one paper/year at their choice?

If you are interested in cross-cultural analysis, play and human cognition do yourself a favor and reach this amazing post - and the preprint. I’m so chuffed to be part of this research!

How can we study human development over two thousand years? For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary. Thread 👇 🧵

"...it remains unclear how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition. The study outlines four pathways: culture can privilege one cognitive process over another, prune out disfavored processes, produce new processes, or have no effect on cognition." www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Excellent point. Habits can be bad but they are not "addiction". And, if instead of pathologising, we think in these terms, we can create better habits for our social media usage. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Baumard & André answer to the commentaries to "The ecological approach to culture". An important conversation for everybody interested in application of evolutionary theory to culture. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I link della settimana (#131) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Social information use in the wild! Humans are basically using local enhancement.

I wonder whether AI usage will exacerbate academic divisions, at least in social sciences - users vs non-users, which are already quite clearly overlapping with the divisions already there.

"Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds of randomly selected participants before the 2020 US election did not have a detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, turnout or political participation."

I am not very convinced by the idea of "cultural stagnation". Even without entering in cultural niches, mainstream observations seem to vary. E.g., the great majority of most-listened songs on Spotify is post 2010. (Note these are cumulative streamings, which advantage older songs)

Looks like an interesting initiative socialmediaban.lisboncouncil.net

Looking forward to Jamie Tehrani's guest lecture in my cultural analytics course, open to everybody. If you are in Trento and want to know more about cultural evolution, that is a great opportunity! eventi.unitn.it/en/origins-s...

I link della settimana (#130) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Even those convinced that social media has negative effects on teenagers generally agree that these effects are mediated by socioeconomic status (SES): lower SES → more usage → more negative outcomes, or some variation of this. So what would a ban actually change?

"the effect of population size depends on attention filtering [...] CCE was enhanced in larger populations when participants could use an external record to support learning and innovation." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I link della settimana (#129) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Qualitative researchers can choose to not engage with AI, but it'd be a shame. nber.org/papers/w34834

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Ironically, most comments here are supporting the claim of the article... www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

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...

Madness, produced by the madness of making students customers. www.ft.com/content/a0cf...

My kind of papers. "Can LLMs Cook Jamaican Couscous? A Study of Cultural Novelty in Recipe Generation" arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10964

Wikipedia has different versions for every language, and the same topics don't always use the same pictures. Here you can search for topics and see the pictures in the different versions. walzr.com/in-every-lan...

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

Ho scritto un editoriale per il magazine dell'Università di Trento sul nostro recente articolo: Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...

Interesting preprint: "Popularity Feedback Constrains Innovation in Cultural Markets" arxiv.org/pdf/2602.09997

Technology as co-adaptation - check replies and quotes...

"The current paper argues for a more explicitly interactive, co-adaptive account for trends in communications technology and politics." 👏 academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

I link della settimana (#128) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

English translation forthcoming!

Thank you to @nicolebizzotto.bsky.social for this great review (in English!) of Tecnopanico www.hope.uzh.ch/scoms/articl...

Only for Italians.

Counterintuitive finding on TikTok algorithm: "Despite the strong amplification of interest-aligned content, exploration remains substantial [...] roughly one-third of the content remains unaligned." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An interview with RAI Trentino - “Young people and social media, Acerbi: ‘A ban is not the best approach.’” www.rainews.it/tgr/trento/v...

🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴 Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout ! 📌 www.gallicagram.com

Venerdì prossimo sarò a Modena, se siete da quelle parti potete registrarvi qui. www.learningmorefestival.it/i/69660c385c...

I link della settimana (#127) open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Against a deterministic view of digital technology usage: "Overall platform use has declined, with the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media altogether" (in US) arxiv.org/html/2510.25...