as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

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)

🚨 New Paper Alert! We investigated the developmental trajectories of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic social norm acquisition among BaYaka and Bandongo in northern Rep. Congo, a community where inter-ethnic cooperation is common. We found that... journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

"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...

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

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

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Angebote für Studierende, "die noch nicht so gern prompten, weil sie lieber selbst formulieren und denken wollen." Dazu fällt mir auch nichts mehr ein.

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Happy to share this early Christmas present 🎄: our paper about geometry- and locomotion-dependence of 3D memory got published in PNAS! Joint work with co-first-author Volker Reisner (@reisnerv.bsky.social) as well as Leonard König, Misun Kim & Christian Doeller www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interesting postdoc position on modeling psychological resilience at the DKFZ Hector Cancer Institute, Mannheim: jobs.dkfz.de/en/jobs/1682... --> dynamic/latent-variable models, Bayesian hierarchical models, causal inference, time-series analysis, cognitive modelling

Ending 2025 strong—new paper out today in #ProcB! Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalizability 🐦🌿🧠👩‍💻 Preprint thread below 👇 Paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

We're doing the final sprint, and I think we're able to send the PDF of the forthcoming Bayesian Workflow book to the publisher in the next two weeks (500+ pages), which would mean it would be published some time next year

Psychologists, what are your favorite (open) data sets for teaching multilevel modelling? I have a lot of observational examples, would love a therapy RCT with varying effects for therapists or some such.

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... And more below 👇

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Would you like to share your research skills with the ESLR community? Starting next year, we will be hosting regular online sessions serving as a platform of mutual exchange and support among early-career researchers. Please do get in touch if you are interested in hosting a session!

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...

PhD opportunity: MOVE Details: blogs.reading.ac.uk/crocus-dla/c... Deadline: 12/01/26 Supervisors: @shoalgroup.bsky.social, @inesfuertbauer.bsky.social, @wlallen.bsky.social, @nhcooper123.bsky.social, @marinapapa.bsky.social Apply: blogs.reading.ac.uk/crocus-dla/p...

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS. Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Over the moon to announce that, as of last Friday, I’m officially #PhDone! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me along the way, including, but not limited to, my amazing supervisor @thecharleywu.bsky.social, and all members (past or present) of the HMC lab and the @velezcolab.bsky.social 🎓

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Do people remember where things are relative to their body (e.g. my left side) or relative to the environment (the North/uphill side)? The answer is both at once, according to my new paper now out in Psychological Science! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

This will spark some great papers: an open digital dataset of roads in the Roman Empire www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Part of a startup project funded by Max Planck Innovation's MAX!mize program, we're developing next-generation software for automated analysis of animal social behavior. We have this opening: Software Engineer (m/f/d) (80 - 100 %) Behavioral Analysis Platform Development Details : lnkd.in/ewXgnBmV

The final paper of my dissertation has just been published in Psychometrika (@pmetricsoc.bsky.social). Many thanks to @bsiepe.bsky.social and @danielheck.bsky.social, who co-authored it with me. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Does JavaScript….go hard?!??

New paper out today with Zhian Chen. We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development. What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here? academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

We built the openESM database: ▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place ▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software ▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python Find out more: 🌐 openesmdata.org 📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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! 🙏

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

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Analyzing the academic trajectories of 78,216 psychology researchers, we demonstrate a persistent gender attrition gap, with women psychologists dropping out of academia at consistently higher rates than men psychologists. Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13273

Great to see this work finally released! Fun fact, Valerii was the winner of the #COSMOS2023 poster prize with an earlier iteration of this project

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...

Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5) Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩 Link to study: 10.0.5.91/journal.pbio... Co-authors: @lucymaplin.bsky.social @galarconnieto.bsky.social

EHBEA is looking for new PRESIDENT and SECRETARY for 2026-2029! 👀 If you know of anybody who could represent EHBEA, nominate them as president! If you know with good organisational skills, nominate them as secretary! DEADLINE: 16/12/2026 HERE IS THE FORM 👇 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I am gonna take the option where I get more time to read, understand and write. maybe that AI can go to committee meetings for me?

🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

📢🚀 Are you an early-career researcher working on anything related to culture, behaviour or learning? 🧠🌍 Join ESLR, an interdisciplinary research community! We have a NEW website and our membership is now FREE. 👉 Sign up here to get updates and become a member: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

Finally in my hands! A new book from @mgurven.bsky.social on why we age, and how we can age better, through the lens of evolutionary anthropology💙 Very excited to dive in!

Our fragmentation paper is now finally out! I put some of the dumb quips that didn't make the cut in the alt texts. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

COSMOS2025 kick started!! And we’ve got the generous support from #ESLR community for the ESLR travel award!! Join ESLR if you are interested in social learning, cultural evolution, collective behaviour, and beyond!!

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...