New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS: Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? (or why does it hurt to think) never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience

My main takeaway from this one: Dog domestication is a singular "natural experiment" in brain evolution, one that we're just starting to understand. It's a bit bonkers more neuroscientists aren't working on it.

Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

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...

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social) Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Larger scientific teams produce more impactful breakthroughs + patents I wrote a paper with 4 principles to optimize large scientific collaborations based on the science of cooperation & collective intelligence: osf.io/preprints/ps... And a substack summary: powerofus.substack.com/p/four-princ...

🚨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

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

Everytime I visit a European country that turned the world upside down, colonized millions and whatnot for *spice*, I just have one question: what did y'all do with that spice....???? Because it ain't in the food????

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs. “Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.” worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ? Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Rituals as a stag hunt game?! To the top of the reading list! 🤩

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

New preprint from @tobyhandfield.bsky.social and me! We analyze authorship order norms from two perspectives: (1) why do disciplines have different norms and (2) do those different norms affect what kinds of collaborations take place. arxiv.org/abs/2507.07364

Just 1 week left to apply! 🙏 Pls share with anyone you think might be interested. If there are any Q's, get in touch! 👉 3x PhD position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html 👉 2yr Postdoc position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes. This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

this is BEAUTIFUL!

Super excited for our CogSci paper on the dynamics of conversation led by @helen-schmidt.bsky.social and @clairebergey.bsky.social !

New paper! Managing speed-accuracy tradeoffs is an important part of commonsense psychology. But how do we do it in groups, where no single person controls decision speed? The two teams below need to make a decision — and it probably feels obvious that the green team will take longer. But why?

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. People think about the ties between other people, including ties among individuals to whom they are not themselves directly connected. These “cognitive social networks” have rarely been studied. 1/

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀 I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales 👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html 👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

🚀 Our last paper on leadership dynamics in open-source software teams has been featured in the Editor's highlights at @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/collections/...

This is fantastic, causal work demonstrating the basal ganglia’s role in explore-exploit decision making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"One obvious lesson from all this is that, rather plausibly, we today have some convictions and conceits that educated people of the future will label as crackpottery."

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

A large-scale study of academics’ tweets shows disparities in who shapes academic discourse and how it reaches the public. @prashantgarg.bsky.social @trfetzer.com @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social #AcademicTwitter #ClimateAction www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"As super-Starlings, our human murmuration takes place not in air, but in social information systems, where behaviour leaves traces in the cognitive environment of language by which intelligence becomes embedded again in the action environment (it is stigmergic)." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below. First, up "mountain calendars"...

The Guardian has an 'explainer' about the India-Pakistan conflict that manages to avoid stating that the border between the countries was originally drawn by an Englishman who had never been to India and signed off on in a hurry by Lord Mountbatten because he had to get back to Britain for a party.

Our paper on the resilience of animal networks is out! Animals have culture: dolphins use sponges to hunt, elephants swat flies with branches. What happens to their capacity to keep and pass on knowledge when members are lost to poaching? That's the question we try to answer! shorturl.at/GvG0d

New preprint! 🚨How do groups process information? What does it mean for part of a network to "explore" and part to "exploit"? How do we move beyond phenomenological correlation in our analyses of networks to a causal theory of collective intelligence? Here, we try to answer these questions:

Selection for rapid collective decisions produces hierarchical organizational structure, while selection for higher-quality, deliberative solutions produces egalitarian structures. Speed-Quality Tradeoffs Shape the Structure of Decision-Making Collectives osf.io/preprints/so...

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science: How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

In recent months, I’ve been working to quantify the history of philosophy utilizing tools developed in science of science. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a science of philosophy, complementing meta-philosophy, meta-science, and philosophy of science. Check it out here:

"By introducing a causal framework for information processing in collectives, our study delivers a more definitive explanation of collective problem-solving than those offered by structural analysis alone." This looks like an awesome paper for the social epistemology crowd! osf.io/preprints/so...

New preprint! 🚨How do groups process information? What does it mean for part of a network to "explore" and part to "exploit"? How do we move beyond phenomenological correlation in our analyses of networks to a causal theory of collective intelligence? Here, we try to answer these questions:

🚨New preprint!🚨"Sexual division of labour shapes hunter-gatherer spatial ranges". Following on the sexual division of labour theme, finally out our analyses on the lifetime spatial ranges of over 700 Mbendjele BaYaka 🤩 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New episode!! 📣📣 A conversation with Bradley Irish about the (alleged) universality of human emotions. Are there "basic" emotions? Do our linguistic categories shape what we feel? Did people in Elizabethan London experience disgust the same way we do today? Listen: disi.org/universal-em...

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

I’m certainly not a superwoman but it’s so exciting to be featured in a comic that I grew up reading 🥳 😇 @ncbsbangalore.bsky.social #TinkleMagazine

🔥New Night Science paper!! Discovery happens when your initial plans fall apart but it requires you to have a particular mindset: it's not extraverted, orderly, neurotic or agreeable that's the most important – discovery requires an OPENNESS to new ideas and unexpected insights.

Check out how academic communities interact online on bsky and form a massive network! 👇🏽

Unsurprisingly, the AI community is the worst offender. Women in NLP and Women in AI shine through the sea of men, proving that dedicated spaces in male-dominated fields aren’t just nice—they’re necessary.

Communities in Bluesky, mesmerising:

📢 The academic network has grown!! 🧪👩‍🔬 🔗 ketikagarg.github.io/blueSkyAcade... We now have large communities in AI, climate change, psychology, neuroscience, history, and philosophy, and more! A shallow dive into some new communities and some interesting (and disheartening) patterns: 🧵👇

🌎 It’s especially heartening to see the climate change community grow, connecting topics like Cinema History, Audience Research, SciComm to more traditional topics of Climate Science. Also, fun seeind the Vegan Academics in the community :D ! 🌱💚 #ClimateScience

Since it’s Women’s History Month and given the current discourse on DEI, I looked at gender diversity in these academic communities. Overall, women are less represented in academic packs, but not too bad I suppose. In the link, you can color the packs now based on the proportion of men/women