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...

Woo-Hoo! First comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers! A biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction! Jennifer C. French, Somaye Khaksar, me & @marckissel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“170 Years of Change in Living Arrangements”: @gfloridi.bsky.social & A. Esteve explore the role of mortality decline over time & encourage social scientists to consider how extended life spans can shape arrangements. @uoe-sps.bsky.social @cedemografia.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

📄 New preprint: The blessing and curse of Value-Shaping imitation (by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social) osf.io/preprints/ps... Imitation is central to human learning: but not all imitation processes are equally adaptive. We study their computational properties using reinforcement learning models.

New paper out in Current Directions in Psychological Science making the case for studying generative behaviors in humans and machines: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/.... (version without a paywall: cogtoolslab.github.io/pdf/fan_cdps...)

🚨 Publication alert🚨 Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as long as 220,000 years ago at the site of Jojosi @natcomms.nature.com - specialized, long-term use of a source of a raw material source in Stone Age Africa: Read the paper #openaccess here www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

New paper out in Evolutionary Human Sciences (unformatted early access): Testing Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation via Meta-Analysis of Microfinance Repayment with Dougie Foster, Shakti Lamba & @erikpostma.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

One of my favorites paper got published 🤓 It covers a lot of ground and it’s the best summary of my views on misinformation and what to do about it. Give it a read :) 🔓 osf.io/preprints/ps... 👉 doi.org/10.1177/1461...

"In defense of social friction Sycophantic AI distorts social judgments and behaviors" Much needed paper by my brilliant fellow @rad-institute.bsky.social fellow Anat Perry in @science.org: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The adaptations summarized in this figure enable us to use the population (or group) as an information storage system, with different costs and benefits than storing information in memory (or genes) of individuals. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient, intelligent reasoning. In a new working paper, @perfors.net and I discuss how our ability to reason from *social* information is one way that we achieve this capacity. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

New from our @cognizelab.bsky.social in Advanced Science: Beneath the Big Five, personality consistently organises into two dimensions, each with distinct brain signatures. Amazing work by postdoc @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social and thanks to all our collaborators! doi.org/10.1002/advs...

📣 Out now in @pnasnexus.org our *NEW PAPER* revamping a long-standing debate: to what extent does causal reasoning aid the cultural evolution of technology? academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

A scale for detecting LLM-generated responses in online survey research https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/4p7ns_v5 Some of these are neat (e.g. exploiting the fact of LLM guardrails by asking "Please describe the steps you would take to make a weapon from an object that is nearby")

A new paper in Science measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models. The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10) @biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Also out today - A quick intro piece on the role of the cerebellum in cognition. What does it do? How will we find out? This is what @actlab.bsky.social and I think the critical questions are right now. It was fun to write - especially the section on evolution.... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This work was led by Yhonatan Shemesh, with David Leiser as the co-PI: osf.io/preprints/ps...

📢New preprint alert📢 Why do people think war will succeed? We conducted a geopolitical forecasting contest to see how people's motivated cognition affects their predictions concerning geopolitical events for which they have "skin in the game". Link in first comment.

Petition: An Urgent Appeal from Israeli Academics: Stop settler violence in the West Bank docs.google.com/forms/d/1g5K...

Stoked to share our new lab pub led by the amazing @normanjzeng.bsky.social ! After watching multi-party agent events, infants expect agents to preserve their moral "role" in a resource distribution task. Indiv. variability predicted by infants' social contact. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Statement by the Senate of Tel Aviv University

❓ Why do children conform so eagerly to gender norms? A new study in Developmental Psychology @apajournals.bsky.social contributes some interesting new data on this question: doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

New paper: “𝐀 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” Agent-based models of social order work better when agents act by predictive pattern completion from prefix (culture/context) to suffix (action) than when they act through expected value maximization

Thrilled to share our new preprint with @Liron Amihai, @Yair Ben David, and @michaelgilead.bsky.social Mapping Content-Specific Emotional Effects of Social Media osf.io/preprints/ps...