How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.

💫📢 Couldn't be more excited to finally kick-off SWARM-E and bring our collective behaviour communities together 🤩 A huge thank you to @zif-bielefeld.bsky.social for the trust & support 🙏 More details coming soon 👇

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Happy to have contributed to the latest HBES newsletter on our recent paper, The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter, led by @vivek123.bsky.social I reflect on MTH through the lens of my research on Bayaka women's foraging & cooperation in the Congolese rainforest www.hbes.com/revisiting-m...

🚨 Now out in PNAS In decision research, "talk is cheap." We show it isn't. Using LLMs to analyze participants' free-text explanations of their choices, we find verbal reports are a rich, scalable window into how people actually decide. 🔗 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led by Kamil Fulawka

This is cultural suicide and intellectual vandalism. In an era where humanities-illiterate tech bros have unearned god-like powers, we need historians, philosophers, ethicists, classicists more than ever.

AUTOMATING COMPUTATIONAL REPRODUCIBILITY My colleague @philipjakobbln.bsky.social and I are currently engaged in a research project where we reproduce scientific results en masse. To that end, we built rigor.me, a platform for automatically reproducing papers using agents 🧵

Sharing our latest endeavour here. How reproducible is your paper? @philipjakobbln.bsky.social and I built rigor.me to ease the burden of computational reproducibility. If you provide a paper, data and code, we execute it and tell you what works (and what fails). Beta is available now: rigor.me

✨🚨 @ehbea.bsky.social IS GOING GLOBAL🚨✨ #EHBEA2028 will be a fully online global event, opening the door for those who have rarely/never been able to attend. We’re looking for volunteers at all career stages and levels of involvement. 👉 forms.office.com/e/vCT8Dqk1Mp Please share widely 🫶

New paper with Ángel Jiménez, @keith-jensen.bsky.social, Lei Chang and Hui Jing Lu Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

excited about this one: using longitudinal movement data and dyadic models, we show that orangutan moms adjust their ranging patterns so their kids can play with age-mates independent of kinship, at personal costs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Look how far we've come in just a few years! We're fast as well! It turns out, recruiting reviewers is much easier when they're not being used as free labor for massively profitable publishers Support free-to-publish and Open Access science by submitting to Open Mind today! direct.mit.edu/opmi

my group is looking for a HiWi (student assistant) to help transcribe narrative interviews for our project on Inuit health and well-being. Must be a student enrolled in a bachelor or master's program at a German University. Link here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

A great preprint is out! It was also super fun collaborating with science museums!! Huge thanks to Humboldt Forum and Miraikan too!!

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

🚨 Student Job Alert @mpib-berlin.bsky.social 🚨 Join a Germany–Japan comparative project on war-site tourism and how tour guides co-create collective memory as "memory mediators." Starts Sept 2026. Apply by 30 June. See below for more details👇 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2369370/2026...

Congrats to @henrikejngblt.bsky.social for winning this year’s Science Communication Prize at #PuG2026 with the project @books-and-brains.bsky.social Looking forward to reading your reviews on the neuroscientific bases of popular novels 📚🧠 Go follow @books-and-brains.bsky.social !

Postdoc position @unimarburg.bsky.social in the project: "Bridging the Gap Between Verbal Psychological Theories & Formal Statistical Modeling with Large Language Models" (funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de) 📅Start: 01.10.2026 |⏳3 years 🔗 Job posting: uni-marburg.de/78NrWT Thanks for sharing!

"​Levelling: behaviours that constrain inequality in animal societies" Read more in Trends in Ecology & Evolution: www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... @danaipapageorgiou.bsky.social & colleagues @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social

💙 Call for contributions! 💙 To mark 60 years since the Man the Hunter conference (1966), Hunter Gatherer Research is curating a two-part special issue on “Lessons and Reflections from Hunter-Gatherer Research” www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/hgr A thread on the two issues & formats👇

🚨New Preprint🚨 from amazing PhD student @ryguy.io! We augmented the classic DDM to account for state-dependent changes in decision strategy and found a clear improvement. Applied to a novel 24 hour dataset we found support for circadian influence on decisions and more! Check out thread and paper!

enough changes have accumulated that I've decided to make a new release of STbayes 🥳 Bunch of improvements, and I've dumped quite a few hours into implementing a relatively painless leave-future-out cross validation (LFO-CV) procedure for model comparison (michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/news...)

Our book is officially out and there is even an audiobook version! Unfortunately, it’s not narrated by us, so you’ll miss out on our lovely Italian/French accents (a tragic loss for audiobook history). Apparently, Amazon.fr has only three copies left: THANK YOU! www.amazon.fr/Decision-Mak...

Two poster presentations from my group at #sbdm2026 in Paris. Magdalena Soukupová on the social learning mechanisms of human goal selection and @pierreledenmat.bsky.social on (lack of) mentalizing in social learning.

We're hiring a PhD student at the Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, @unibas.ch! How do people and societies make sense of technologies and their risks? Details and link to apply in the job posting, review of applications begins on 24 June 2026. jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

Looking forward to giving an online workshop this coming Thursday on using STbayes to model social transmission. I'll be walking through simulating data, fitting, interpreting and comparing models. Big up to the ESLR for organizing this series!

Interested in how social information is transmitted in networks? 🚨Join ESLR Workshop happening this week! 🗓 May 28, 2026 ⏰ 2pm CET Online Introduction to Bayesian Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) with STbayes by @mchimento.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/mNSksgpimmrs...

Not to missed if you're interested in cultural diffusion through networks!

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!

Roll up, roll up: @riadsala.bsky.social did some more thinking about our model of visual foraging: doi.org/10.1371/jour.... It now has some shiny new parameters (absolute direction!) and it's not bad at distinguishing individual differences in strategies too. #PsychSciSky #VisionScience

@ehbea.bsky.social develops different grants to support its community’s research 🔬 We fund them mainly by our membership fees, but we are also open for donations of any amount 😌 Help us keep doing our work and support the evolutionary human sciences 🙌 More info👇 www.ehbea.org/pages/donate

🚨Next week's talk at ARC Join us for a talk presented by Dr. Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). 📅 21 May 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online See the link for details👇 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/45727...

Joe Henrich emphasizing the importance of formal models at #CES2026

Really enjoyed running this workshop with @alexschakowski.bsky.social. More sessions in our ESLR skill-sharing series are coming soon!

Join us at 2pm today at the @eslr.bsky.social skill-sharing session for a basic introduction to Bayesian modelling using Stan and brms! 🧑‍🎓

There is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting! www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

It was a great honor to speak at such an interesting and creative community.

Great talk by @jingyux.bsky.social bringing the collective behaviour vibe to #ehbea2026 ! Stay tuned to her beky account for the upcoming preprints on her talk on social learning + social networks

Using simulations, we investigated whether Value-Shaping imitation was always a good thing. And it's not (or is it ?? *gasp*) 🧵

📄 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 report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇 1/10

📘 Excited to share that Decision Making: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) is now available online (PDF for subscribers): doi.org/10.1093/9780... What is it about? Understanding how humans (and other agents) make choices. Below a bit more information👇

I wrote up something that's been in my head for a while: psychometric methods alone can't tell us what cognitive tasks and their indicators measure. Correlating indicators across tasks is circular when constructs are defined by those same correlations. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/3

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

How spatial configuration shapes memory and cognitive load: A behavioural and EEG study of simultaneous spatial and associative memory www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 TODAY at 2pm CET online: Workshop - Code review in practice: A checklist for computational reproducibility and collaborative research in ecology and evolution with @fhillemann.bsky.social Join at: calendar.app.google/3gjfLpKW4mW2...

📣 Check out the ESLR Skill-Sharing Sessions schedule for Spring 2026! A series of workshops by the ESLR community on reproducibility, Bayesian modeling, accessibility, and more 🌱 The first one is happening TODAY! 🔗 See the full schedule: www.eslrsociety.com/events

Join the ESLR skill-sharing session on computational reproducibility tomorrow. Open to anyone who is interested. Details below 👇

🚨 Save the date! 🚨 Join the first @eslr.bsky.social skill-sharing online workshop next week to learn more about computational reproducibility from @fhillemann.bsky.social! Details below 👇

New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...