AI agents are sensitive to nudges. Indeed, LLM's can be behaviorally brittle under subtle changes in choice architecture, even in the absence of adversarial settings. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Some new work on AI & science: A reporting checklist for LLMs in behavioral science Thanks to @sfeuerriegel.bsky.social for spearheading. As LLMs become more common in research, transparency is essential. We developed a reporting checklist for reporting how LLMs were used - please share! 1/4

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

I'm staying at my friend's house. Will my friend expect to stay at my house, next time? What if I said, I'm staying at my parent's friend's house. Will my parent's friend expect to stay at my house next time? How relationships change expectations: see🧵on new paper by @aliciamchen.bsky.social

🚨Preprint alert🚨 Research on discourse incoherence (e.g., in psychosis) usually focuses on patients' language, but what happens to people who interact with misaligned partners? Using a novel approach, we show evidence for reciprocity in semantic misalignment. 🧵👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint from the lab! Here, @yongling.bsky.social shows that people prioritise self / ingroup-related information to guide their decisions - irrespective of their autistic traits.

New preprint led by @lucasmolleman.bsky.social investigates social information use across the human lifespan. Testing >40,000 participants aged 6-80 in museums in Berlin and Japan. psyarxiv.com/hec96

Happy to share the early-access version of our new paper " Active conflict and national identity shape intergroup bias among Arabic and Hebrew speakers in Israel" led by Fady Khoury. Fady was interested in the way first and second language shape social decisions www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First an epidemic of anxiety, and now an epidemic of infertility: "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44."

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation w/ @vivek123.bsky.social about Man the Hunter. The idea that male hunting propelled our evolution is old and contested. Yet it endures, especially in the popular imagination. Is it merely a "paleofantasy," or is there more to it? Listen: disi.org/is-man-the-h...

New article out in @natcomms.nature.com Reference-point dependent reinforcement learning in humans and rats By Lachlan Ferguson, Magda Soukupova (co-first), Seb Bouret, me and Shauna Parkes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Children's prosocial and selfish rule-breaking following an implicit quid pro quo 🚨Recent work by Leon Li and Sebastian Grueneisen

Out in PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Inequality is not only hard to solve. Sometimes, it is hard to *see*. We ask a simple question: Do people notice when members of minority groups are absent? Across field studies and experiments, the answer was often no.

📄 New paper: people choose AI models partly on political grounds This is joint work with @pettertornberg.com @chrisbail.bsky.social @michelleschimmel.bsky.social and led by @michaelheseltine.bsky.social

Happy to share the early-access version of our new paper " Active conflict and national identity shape intergroup bias among Arabic and Hebrew speakers in Israel" led by Fady Khoury. Fady was interested in the way first and second language shape social decisions www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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!

Now available: Preference-based representations for collective agency, in which we try to expand the notion of agency from one individual to collaboration and preferences as dependent upon another onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

💙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...

Representational drift as a Rorschach test in analytical thinking... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our multiverse analysis of associations between skin conductance and acute pain is published! >550 participants x 18 SCR pipelines = 1 winning approach to SCR analysis! (Ledalab + artifact detection). thread below. We hope others find this useful! Please RT :) journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex...

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

People prefer to use “sycophantic” AI systems that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. In a new paper (n=7,227), we found that people enjoyed interacting with sycophantic AI chatbots more than interacting with neutral chatbots or “disagreeable” chatbots that challenged their beliefs.

Does PTSD risk leave traces in the body’s daily rhythms? Our new study, just published in @translational psychiatry followed Supernova festival survivors after Oct 7 using real-world sleep and heart-rate data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PTSD #Wearables #UniveristyofHafia #Psychiatry #sleep

This is beautiful on so many levels. It names clearly and directly one of the insidious tactics that tech uses to evade effective regulation. It exemplifies a way in which humanistic scholarship provides critically important insight. >> link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

Recent preprint with Oriel FeldmanHall and Matt Nassar, showing clear neural evidence that adolescent (13-15 yrs) social media and smartphones use are associated with blunted reward signaling in the ventral striatum, the brain's reward processing hub, and worse mental health. osf.io/preprints/ps...

out now in Psych Review, a project many years in the making: "Reverse Engineering the Centered Self" bit.ly/4wp9fgN

Our new paper with @maxtaylordavies.bsky.social introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

We found that the preference for allowing freedom of expression vs. limiting the spread of misinformation is politically polarized: In 32 out of 40 countries, right-leaning participants prioritize protecting free expression more than left-leaning participants (55% vs. 48%). osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

Technological folie à deux: feedback loops between AI chatbots and mental health www.nature.com/articles/s44... This is a real concern. I wonder if it's truly a new concern, though...

"A Systematic Review of Formal Models of Communicative Coordination Across Species" — led by @chrismmcox.bsky.social w @andrearavignani.bsky.social , S.Sørensen, @annapzamm.bsky.social , @frantsjensen.bsky.social , G.Bryant, @acristia.bsky.social, and me - osf.io/preprints/ps... A thread 1/

From peripersonal space to cognitive maps: An evolutionary perspective www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Why do some people never get lost while others rely on GPS? A new review, written by @hugospiers.bsky.social and @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... argues that navigation ability is shaped by both fixed factors (age, genetics) and modifiable ones (sleep, exercise, experience).

New preprint! How do threat beliefs drive avoidance & what happens when avoidance prevents us from verifying them? New work showing a bidirectional link between beliefs and avoidance! Lucky to work w @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social @tobywise.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 Our lab's first paper is published! The claim: anxiety distorts not just what looks threatening, but the task models people use to plan. 🧵 This tiny study provides preliminary support that world model variation is critical to explaining anxiety. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself go.nature.com/4tvFx7I

Excited that this work with @rachitdubey.bsky.social and @cocoscilab.bsky.social is finally officially out!

📢 New preprint out now! In three samples (N=594), including a U.S.-representative cohort and a test-retest cohort, we formalize social motivation, learning, and homeostatic control within a single computational framework and identify a phenotype linked to chronic loneliness doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

A small fraction of online actors exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and discusses. In a new paper, we trace how social media influencers turn fringe claims into viral narratives by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms & crowds osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

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/

Phil Trans Roy Soc B theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’ is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

New preprint of a paper with Eunice Yiu to appear in Philosophical Transactions A, Special issue: World models, 2026. The theoretical link between empowerment in RL and Bayesian causal models with cool new data. arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels. The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

New preprint (by Vandendriessche et al.) In everyday life, choices often lead to multiple simultaneous outcomes — some positive, some negative. Yet most reinforcement learning research has focused on situations where each choice produces only a single outcome 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...