New preprint w/ Leo Tiokhin & @lakens.bsky.social! Registered Reports (RRs) are great for science b/c publication is guaranteed before results are known, reducing publication bias & QRPs. This feature supposedly also makes them great for *scientists*. But is that really true? 1/ tinyurl.com/4sy993rr

Career incentives make Registered Reports unattractive under realistic academic conditions

Registered Reports are a publication format designed to reduce publication bias by guaranteeing publication before results are known. This guarantee is considered attractive in the prevailing ‘publish...

tinyurl.com

Our article introducing the #openESM database for experience samling data, led by @bsiepe.bsky.social, has now been published 🎉 Paper: link.springer.com/article/10.3... openESM interactive website: openesmdata.org GitHub repository: github.com/openesm-proj...

New preprint with @dominikdeffner.bsky.social: While social learning is broadly adaptive when repeated decision outcomes are independent, we show that when outcomes depend on prior success, most social learning strategies deteriorate performance and increase inequality: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/7

Learning from the most successful people makes sense? We show that social learning, and especially payoff bias, is bad when choice outcomes are dependent on prior success💰 As such "rich-get-richer" dynamics are everywhere, this shows fundamental boundary conditions for the benefits of SL!

Paul Bergmann@pkbergmann.bsky.social · 4w ago

New preprint with @dominikdeffner.bsky.social: While social learning is broadly adaptive when repeated decision outcomes are independent, we show that when outcomes depend on prior success, most social learning strategies deteriorate performance and increase inequality: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/7

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...

Revisiting Man the Hunter - HBES

– by Haneul Jang For decades, the phrase Man the Hunter has occupied a central place in discussions of human evolution. Today, however, the phrase sounds outdated, evoking a familiar image of men hunt...

hbes.com

New research! 📚 We built the largest database to date of cephalopod species - octopuses, squids and cuttlefish - and their brains, habitats and behaviors 🐙🧠📈 What did we find?👇 Press release: www.lse.ac.uk/news/ecologi... Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

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

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

The ethnographic record shows that women do hunt, sometimes for big game. Does that mean that 'Man the Hunter' was a myth all along? Just one of the topics discussed in our latest episode, w/ @vivek123.bsky.social! Listen: disi.org/is-man-the-h...

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

Here's a proper mathematical model of the interaction between conformity and migration www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... mostly coming to the same conclusions as the simulations I did here journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Interaction of migration and frequency dependence in cultural populations

Migration has shaped cultural and genetic diversity. Population genetics shows that low migration rates between populations can homogenise them. Howev…

sciencedirect.com

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!

Move over, GLM-HMM—there’s a new hidden Markov model in town. In our new preprint, we introduce the DDM-HMM: a model that jointly infers latent decision states from reaction times and choices. Using 24-hour behavioral data from rats, we found that evidence accumulation changes with time of day!

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Diurnal rhythms of choice: a novel state-dependent drift diffusion model uncovers time-dependent changes in rat decision making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727672v1

Here is @alexschakowski.bsky.social on social learning strategies in Finnish fishing competitions

Check out our new paper! (1/5) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @err-ring.bsky.social @kkshimizu1.bsky.social @markstoneking.bsky.social @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @isle-uzh.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity | PNAS

Linguistic structures show uneven global distributions, but it remains unknown to what extent such distributions are driven by human population his...

pnas.org

🎉🦜NEW PAPER ALERT 🦜🎉 Which social learning biases underly the acquisition of novel food in wild parrots ? We (@lucymaplin.bsky.social, @bjjbarrett.bsky.social, @sonjawild.bsky.social, @drjohnmartin.bsky.social) presented >700 cockies with a novel, artificial food (🧵1/6)

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · 3mo ago

Adopting novel food is vital to colonize novel environments, but what is the role of social learning? Study of urban #cockatoos by @clevercockierp.bsky.social shows them to rapidly adopt novel food via #SocialLearning, with juveniles showing conformist preferences @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4uq6NVq

Two simulation studies in this paper show that doubly robust methods for causal inference—especially regression weighted by inverse propensity scores—are more robust to model misspecification than traditional regression across many scenarios. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

A review and evaluation of doubly robust approaches for estimating average treatment effects - Behavior Research Methods

In nonexperimental studies, obtaining an unbiased estimate of the average treatment effect (ATE) typically requires two key assumptions: that all relevant covariates are measured (i.e., no unmeasured ...

link.springer.com

This is correct. Best available estimates suggest that the destruction of USAID, in which musk played a central role, will kill over 14 million people by 2030, 1/3 of them children aged < 5 years www.thelancet.com/article/S014...

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

thelancet.com

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Elon Musk has also disrupted, by which I mean brutally ended, the lives of over a million poor children and adults globally by means of destroying USAID, but who gives a fuck, right?

Final version of this paper is now published. Find out what the microfinance literature can tell us about the evolution of human cooperation

Alex Mesoudi@alexmesoudi.com · 4mo ago

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...

🚨ESLR Workshop tomorrow: 🗓 April 23, 2026 ⏰ 2pm CET Online Bayesian modeling of cognition and behavior using brms and Stan @alexschakowski.bsky.social and @lucahahn.bsky.social Join at: calendar.app.google/mNSksgpimmrs...

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...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS

Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks&mdash;gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

pnas.org

We're looking for a new postdoc to join our team! Do you enjoy conceptualizing, improving, and rethinking empirical methods training for social scientists? Then this job might be for you 😊 Feel free to share among your network and to reach out if you have any questions!

GESIS Training@gesistraining.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Postdoc-Stelle im Team Training: 100 % (4 Jahre), Mannheim oder Köln. Fokus: Konzeption & Koordination von Trainings in den Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung, mit Möglichkeiten zur internationalen Vernetzung. 30 % Forschung, frei gestaltbar. Jetzt bewerben ➡️ t1p.de/joboffer_KEO...

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

New MSc Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig 😍 Would've absolutely loved this program!!! www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/...

New blog just dropped! This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓 haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

How to Estimate a Mean, and What It Means for Science | Computational Psychology

Introduction If I asked you to estimate 30 means, you would probably compute 30 sample means. And you would be provably wrong (well.. maybe not wrong, but at least provably inefficient).

haines-lab.com

🚨I couldn’t be happier to share that today I’m officially starting my own research group at the Human Origins Cluster of Excellence in Tübingen (@humanorigins.bsky.social)!🚨We’ll explore drivers of genetic, phenotypic and cultural evolution by integrating evidence from many fields in creative ways 🧬

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

📣 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...

The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology

Abstract. Humans are uniquely capable of producing highly efficient tools, but the extent to which this capacity depends on individual reasoning abilities

academic.oup.com

We are hiring a tenure track (!) senior researcher in political economy! This is obviously a great job (permanent without teaching obligation) and I hope you all apply. However, I would like to take a moment to share just how significant this is in the German academic context ⬇️

Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG)@mpifg.bsky.social · 4mo ago

📢 Call: Tenure Track Position The MPIfG Political Economy Research Area led by Lucio Baccaro is seeking a Senior Researcher. Open to candidates with at least two years’ postdoc experience. Please share widely! 🗓️ Apply by April 20, 2026 s.gwdg.de/WPMPp1