What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

National identity drives a range of actions, from civic engagement to intergroup violence. Our new paper presents a novel approach using LLMs to code expressions of positive (national identification, patriotism) & defensive (nationalism, national narcissism) identities. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Group-dependent learning and decision neural signals underlie the persistence of intergroup bias: https://osf.io/dzhrx

📣 New publication 📣 Very excited to share our new paper "A neural signature of adaptive mentalization" out now in Nature Neuroscience (the project started all the way back in 2018!); with @niklasbuergi.bsky.social @drgokhanaydogan.bsky.social @christianruff.bsky.social (1/4)

New preprint! Where we used multiplayer games to track brain activity underlying the sustained intergroup bias. Led by @oritn.bsky.social . "Group-dependent learning and decision neural signals underlie the persistence of intergroup bias" doi.org/10.31234/osf... 👇

New preprint! Where we used multiplayer games to track brain activity underlying the sustained intergroup bias. Led by @oritn.bsky.social . "Group-dependent learning and decision neural signals underlie the persistence of intergroup bias" doi.org/10.31234/osf... 👇

How do everyday people in authoritarian regimes think about politics? And how do the public's attitudes shape the way autocrats govern? Tony Zirui Yang and I have a new chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics that reviews academic research on these questions: doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍 📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

For our recent paper - on naive humans reinventing how to shape early stone tools - we did sth unusual and sth (hopefully) useful: We included an FAQ section in the supplementary material New methods may benefit from such FAQ's being included. [available at ars.els-cdn.com/content/imag... ]

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

Research by Bursztyn et al, one of the coolest ever studies on incentives to motivate behaviour—the Luftwaffe’s “rat race” of hierarchical, tiered, expanding status-based incentives for German WWII pilots. The performance profiles say it all: buff.ly/o1kye9h 1/2

New paper - "Pupil size response within direct and random exploration and exploitation behaviors selectively reflects value of control" Gili Baraky (collab w Shai Gabay) used pupillometry in the horizon task to test control-mode theories' predictions. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Our new short piece in TiCS on intuitive theories of truth: how people judge whether statements could be true, whether statements are true, and whether to assert them as true. A great collab with @keremoktar.bsky.social @ihandleyminer.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does? In short, yes!

New paper: The origins of meaning: From pragmatic control signals to semantic representations philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

New paper out in Science Advances! I'm really (really) proud of this one. Let's get into it. doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Do our social interactions influence what we become aware of? In our❗new preprint❗@danieljamesyon.bsky.social and I delve into this question: asking whether joint decision making in a detection task can bias awareness reports. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Very excited to share a Special Collection at the Journal of Neuroscience (@sfnjournals.bsky.social) - Central Questions for Social Neuroscience Research. This issue includes some of the latest perspectives on social neuroscience research. Please check it out!👇 www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8

1/ New paper in Communications Psychology: Against Frictionless AI. Led by my student Emily Zohar and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social. The argument: AI's greatest selling point is also its problem. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A new paper dropped out on "Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Understanding the evolution of human semiotic behavior is a crucial (basic) scientific enterprise & really difficult, so kudos! I have thoughts: 1/

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

This study tracked neural responses to political content over 2.5 years using fMRI. Changes in political identity influenced neural plasticity, with significant shifts in the amygdala, hippocampus, caudate, & reward systems, reflecting evolving political affiliations. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

We have a new paper out on how the AI boom is creating a scientific monoculture! Everything AI. "The task for social science is to ensure that, in navigating this moment, we do not become artificial ourselves." www.nature.com/articles/s44... Led by the brilliant @cecilietraberg.bsky.social

🚨 JOB alert: 📢 We are looking for a PhD student to work on our international @wellcometrust.bsky.social project on information gathering in OCD and Schizophrenia! If you have a background in computational psychiatry / neuroimnaging and speak German, apply here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Excited to share this preprint with Yahel Nudler and @thatadammorris.bsky.social in which we provide further evidence that people’s awareness of implicit evaluations is shaky at best — when explicit evaluations provide a misleading cue, participants systematically mispredict: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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.

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle! We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate. It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations. Spread the words!

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.

I just learned that Mattick & Amaral's book about RNA is availabe in an online version: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK595... Highly recommended! Not just for the science but also for the history of science aspect.

What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead! Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception jair.org/index.php/ja...

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

This new paper offers practical solutions for pluralistic ignorance (when people assume their opinon is unpopular when many others share it): -in loose cultures, share accurate information -in tight ones, lowering the costs of speaking up can spark social change. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

People form beliefs not only as individual agents, but as members of social groups. Children (4-6 years old) who belonged to a group were more convinced by evidence that supported their ingroup’s belief (and were less convinced by evidence that opposed their ingroup): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How did childhood evolve? @andrameneganzin.bsky.social & @adrian-currie.bsky.social argue that childhood is a ‘trait complex,’ and this engenders trade-offs between the precision & historical relevance of tests performed in #BehavioralEcology 👇📃 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #evosky #philsci

Article w/ @mfhansen.bsky.social out and open access. In it we outline key historical patterns and the changes in primatology and the behavioural sciences regarding the concepts of primate culture. Interested in primatology and culture (and history)? check it out! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Another good critique of the EES is this adversarial collaboration by @thomscottphillips.bsky.social et al. (2014): academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Our cultural backgrounds almost always (perhaps unavoidably) influence our epistemology & the questions we ask. Especially in the human sciences. E.g. some really interesting discussion here about how renascence values shape our thinking about neanderthal artwork. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

1/ Breaking down the "Trilingual Gender Stereotypes Database" (TGSD)—a new, validated resource for understanding how gender stereotypes work across English, Hebrew, and Arabic. #SocialPsych #Stereotypes #PsychSciSky

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)

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Very excited that this paper is out! www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

For anyone teaching/studying/researching the evolution of language, we wrote a framework paper especially for you! It lays out how bridging diverse fields can give new insights into this most mysterious of human traits. There's a link for free access on MPI website here: www.mpi.nl/publications... 🧪

🚨 New publication 🚨 Excited to share this new forum piece led by @kevinetiede.bsky.social We propose broadening risk communication to cover neglected dimensions outlined in our risk-information taxonomy, requiring greater reliance on simulated experiences. Open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4

Excited to recruit a 🚨 postdoc 🚨 for projects on #AI and evolving scientific practice, norms, and impact! Interdisciplinary work across science of science, philosophy of science, math with creative Purdue/Argonne/CMU/Chicago/Princeton collaborators! *pls repost*! careers.purdue.edu/job/Postdoc-...

Collaborative groups often outperform single individuals in complex problem solving. A new paper examined how to create the right incentives to promote this kind of collective intelligence. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....