I'm teaching an online workshop on ABM and model-based thinking through ICPSR next month. Details linked below in case you or someone you know is interested.

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!

we accept nominations on a rolling basis, but the organizing committee is meeting monday next week to select speakers for next semester. speakers from all career stages and disciplines related to network science and complex systems are welcome. we encourage self-nominations, too!

🚨🚨 The Social Learning and Decisions Lab is hiring! 🚨🚨 We're looking for a postbacc project coordinator/research assistant to join our team this summer. More details about the position and how to apply here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ySeA... Please share widely and reach out with any questions!

new preprint of work with @dimitrisbolis.bsky.social that will be published this summer! across the cognitive sciences, there has been a recent emphasis on *interaction* in studies of behavior. here, we take the implications of this shift seriously. osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨FULLY FUNDED PHD POSITION!🚨 If you are interested in trying to answer the question of "How did climate shape the movements, interactions, and evolution of hominin populations?" Come join my lab at @humanorigins.bsky.social 🧬🧪 deadline 7th of June ⬇️ uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint alert 🚨 ! Check out the full thread below 👇

I’m excited to share our new preprint: A Multi-Level Examination of How Hostility Unfolds During Online Argumentation. osf.io/preprints/ps... This is the first paper to examine how toxicity manifests from belief differences and how they are represented in the human brain.

New preprint out -- the first from my postdoc work @caltech.edu -- excited to share this interdisciplinary collaboration that combines Reddit, Online Chat, and fMRI data! Thanks also to the rest of our team @ketikagarg.bsky.social, Bo Zhang (no Bluesky), and @pandascholar.bsky.social!

New preprint w/ @fearbrain.bsky.social, Bo Zhang, @aanixel.bsky.social & @pandascholar.bsky.social where we examine online political debates to understand how interactions become hostile using data from Reddit, real-time online chat experiments & brain imaging during chats - osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

the amazing @mayankchugh.bsky.social once again powerfully captures the lived realities of inequality in academic mobility by sharing his experiences. this artwork "weighing" Indian and American passports hits really hard -- goes much beyond mobility privileges.

I was supposed to finish this March 31 and then the #Claude Code leak happened, handing me the perfect opening example Some of it has been in the works for longer: it's also a version of (part of) my #DHd2025 keynote titled "What makes LLMs so irresistible?" Read it here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Forwarding predatory conference invites for co-authored work to your co-authors is a good equivalent of ‘thinking of you’ texts.

Press release for our new paper! “…people across the world created inclusive political systems, even under difficult conditions…An understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes.” phys.org/news/2026-03...

People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

📅 Save the date! Join us next Monday, Mar 9th 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Yasaman Asgari (University of Zurich) on global science landscape. Hoping to see you all there!✨

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

We developed a novel network analysis method to investigate this. 'App-journey networks' quantify the patterns by which users transition across Apps in a phone use session, directly from real-world phone use data.

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

📅 Save the date! Join us next Monday, Feb 23rd 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Dr. Assemgul Kozhabek (Heriot-Watt University) on urban mobility networks. Hoping to see you all there!✨

This gets to some important points. There was always something cold, even chilling, about Brockman's "Edge" culture. That feeling still pervades some scientific circles. There's a real problem here that won't go away with Epstein. www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20...

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

New episode, first of 2026!! 🎉🎙️ A deep dive into metaphor with @sflusberg.bsky.social! Metaphors delight, provoke, captivate, shock, and galvanize us. What does it say about the human mind that we simply can't escape them—and frankly don't want to? Listen: disi.org/the-aura-of-...

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 we are hiring 2-3 Postdocs in Social & Decision Neuroscience (SDN) at Caltech. The posting is here www.hss.caltech.edu/about/job-op... Applications are due 15 February 2026. Our core group in SDN is RAdolphs, me, DMobbs, JO'Doherty, and ARangel. Our track record of postdoc success is strong

🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉 "Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n

Thrilled to see this paper out, two years after starting our collaboration at @divintelligence.bsky.social

🚨Excited to share our new theoretical framework to classify and spark mechanistic inquiries into various forms of collective intelligence! Soon to be published in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social Thanks to @divintelligence.bsky.social Thread by Cody Moser @culturologies.co 👇🏽

🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉 "Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n

An excellent resource for data visualization!

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Perfect reading for Thanksgiving break 🤓

The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... "participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search

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! 🤩