NEW: We show and replicate socioeconomic gradients in heuristics for decision-making under uncertainty, possibly reflecting adaptations varying levels of scarcity and competition for resources 🫰 Shoutout and thanks to @danielnettle.bsky.social & @coraliechevallier.bsky.social ❤️‍🔥 tinyurl.com/mu7rzz6k

I’m thrilled to share the preprint with @sangkjyuson.bksy.social. It’s a fun example of applying dynamical systems approaches to social behavior, and the first two-author manuscript from Y-Lab. Sangkyu has put together a well-written thread to walk you through the ideas (see below ⬇️)

Do people judge what is going to happen in unknown situations differently depending on their socioeconomic position? Yes, if you experience lower socioeconomic position, you think the big rewards are even more unlikely to come your way: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

📣 New preprint and database synthesizing 3.8 million decisions from experience 📣 The project offers researchers a unique opportunity to explore how design features shape human learning and decision making. Check out the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We present the decisions-from-experience database (DfE-DB), including data from 168 studies. The data are currently shared with the original authors and made public upon publication. 🔗 Database: github.com/dwulff/dfe-db 🔗 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come join the online ESLR meeting on January 14th to connect with early career researchers interested in social learning and cultural evolution 🤝 🌍 Sign up here to become a member and receive email updates: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

Interested in hosting a skill sharing session for our members? Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Save the date! 🗓️ On the 14th of Jan 2026, we will hold our first online meeting after a prolonged hiatus 💻🌍. This will be a friendly, informal gathering for members to meet and learn about ESLR activities for 2026 including our upcoming skill sharing sessions. 🛠️💡 More information will follow soon!

A new field experiment conducted on Reddit explains why some people lurk quietly and why others become extremely active in online political discussions. Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4oOdywQ

I'm delighted to share that I passed my PhD viva! A huge thank you to Matthew Rushworth and Joe Galea (@galeaj.bsky.social) as examiners and chair @arkadykonovalov.bsky.social. I'm incredibly grateful to supervisors @brainapps.bsky.social and @markdhumphries.bsky.social for all their support.

Interesting postdoc position on modeling psychological resilience at the DKFZ Hector Cancer Institute, Mannheim: jobs.dkfz.de/en/jobs/1682... --> dynamic/latent-variable models, Bayesian hierarchical models, causal inference, time-series analysis, cognitive modelling

New article in Cognitive Psychology with @thorstenpachur.bsky.social and Veronika Zilker: “How sampling strategies shape experience-based risky choice.” We present a computational framework for information search and choice in decisions from experience. 1/4 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

@royalsocietypublishing.org has published an OPEN ACCESS theme issue of Philosophical Transactions B: “Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures” compiled and edited by Adam H Boyette, Sarah Mathew, Stephen Asatsa, Michael Chimento, and Rachel L Kendal 💫 👇 👇 👇

We have already received many wonderful abstracts, thank you all! 🌟 For those who need a little extra time, we have good news: the #EHBEA2026 deadline has been extended to 9 Jan. ✍️✨ Add the finishing touches, hit submit, and join an exciting, inspiring conference! 👉 www.ehbea2026.com

✨NEW WEBSITE✨ We are finishing the year with a brand new website, so please stop by, have a look, and enjoy the new looks of EHBEA 💫 👇 👇 👇 www.ehbea.org

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

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...

🫀 New preprint alert! 🌆 Thrilled to share the first paper of my PhD on heart-rate synchrony during social interactions in urban environments. @sinelabdtu.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Interested in sensory information & animal behaviour but you are in Germany (or close by) and Edinburgh is far? We are hosting a @asab-meetings.bsky.social Hublet in Berlin! Join us for free next week (15-16/12) to follow the conference together😁 More👉 www.scienceofintelligence.de/event/hublet...

Though sadly it's pay-to-view, this blog from @anthropology.net did a great job summarising our recent target article.

Are you unable to continue your research in the USA due to political pressure? 14 Postdoc fellowships (2 years) are available for relocating to Germany

We are open to a range of different topics. Would you like to share a technique you have been using for theoretical modelling or statistical analyses? Do you have visions for improving research practices? Are you captivated by a certain conceptual framework? We would love to hear from you!

Would you like to share your research skills with the ESLR community? Starting next year, we will be hosting regular online sessions serving as a platform of mutual exchange and support among early-career researchers. Please do get in touch if you are interested in hosting a session!

It would have never been possible without the support of my research group, who advised, listened and helped me all throughout the academic year. Thanks EcoLearn! 👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏼👩🏼‍⚕️

If you are an early-career researcher interested in social learning, culture, or related fields, join ESLR! We are a welcoming, interdisciplinary and international community. Remember, you can sign up for free here: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS. Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Over the moon to announce that, as of last Friday, I’m officially #PhDone! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me along the way, including, but not limited to, my amazing supervisor @thecharleywu.bsky.social, and all members (past or present) of the HMC lab and the @velezcolab.bsky.social 🎓

Congrats Dr. Witt @alexthewitty.bsky.social! I'm incredibly lucky and proud to have you as the first minted PhD student in my group. Thnx to @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, Martin Butz, & Peter Dayan for serving on the committee. Here's to a bright future as a postdoc w @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social 🥂

My first, first-author paper on model-based planning in structured foraging environments is out now in Cognition!

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳 We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence. osf.io/preprints/ps... I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...

In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

🧠Our new preprint is out on PsyArXiv! We study how getting more feedback (seeing what you could have earned) and facing gains vs losses change the way people choose between risky and safe options. 🖇️Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... It's a thread🧶:

🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨 We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5

We released a pretty cool dataset/preprint today looking at video game play, cognition, time-use and a ton of self-reported psych measures at osf.io/preprints/ps... with @nballou.bsky.social @matti.vuorre.com @thomashakman.bsky.social @rpsychologist.com and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social RRs coming soon

Congratulations to Dr @mariapykala.bsky.social for successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday. Two big themes. 1) Social learning as a two-step process with psychological biases shaping both network formation and social learning given a network. 2) Cumulative cultural evolution in an AI world.

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

Excited to share our preprint on variability in patch leaving decisions! Check out the 🧵 below

🧪Preprint! How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions. A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches. A 🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025... With @emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Inviting collaborators! 🚨 We’re launching PsychLing-101 — an open, community-driven initiative to gather psycholinguistic datasets for cross-dataset analyses and the development of psycholinguistic foundation models. 👉 To contribute or propose a dataset, go to: 🔗 github.com/Data-X01/Psy...

Dr. Ralf Kurvers, from the MPI of Human Development & TU, Berlin! His work explores how individuals process and share information, how social interactions shape group decisions, and how collective intelligence emerges across species. Learn more about his work 👉 ralfkurvers.com

Part of a startup project funded by Max Planck Innovation's MAX!mize program, we're developing next-generation software for automated analysis of animal social behavior. We have this opening: Software Engineer (m/f/d) (80 - 100 %) Behavioral Analysis Platform Development Details : lnkd.in/ewXgnBmV

❗❗ Just a quick note: We recently discovered an issue with our email system that prevented some incoming messages from reaching us. If you’ve contacted us recently, please resend your message – we’re sorry for the inconvenience!

Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!

This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go. youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...