This is beautiful!! Orangutan moms plan playdates for their kids. Decades of longitudinal data + hierarchical Bayesian social relations models 😍

Brendan Barrett@bjjbarrett.bsky.social · yesterday

Our paper on how orangutan mothers plan and alter their space use at personal costs so their offspring may play with similarly aged offspring (independent of kinship and fruit productivity) has transitioned from preprint to peer reviewed publication doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

🚻 Even though women make up the majority of psychology students, they still leave research at a higher rate than men. 📄 In our new paper, led by Xinyi Zhao, we take a closer look at the gender attrition gap in academic psychology. 👉 Get a quick overview in this press release: mpib.berlin/EBDvH

Women leave psychological research more often than men

The bigger hurdle appears not to be entering academia but staying in it: An international study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development shows that, despite high entry rates, w...

mpib.berlin

Incredibly excited to announce that I’m starting my own research group at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Gießen as part of the excellence cluster “The Adaptive Mind”! 🥳 I'm looking to fill the first PhD position. If you’re interested, apply here: tinyurl.com/38p3h22p Please spread the word! 🙏

Doctoral student (m/f/d) Computational Motivation – Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

jobs.uni-giessen.de

I am part of a team guest editing a special issue of the American Journal of Primatology on "Digitization and use of legacy datasets in primatology” and we are seeking out submissions due on 1 September 2027. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

Could not be more proud of @felicie-dhellemmes.bsky.social for pulling off this insane project, tracking humans and fish simultaneously to study how they interact

Félicie Dhellemmes@felicie-dhellemmes.bsky.social · 2w ago

Proud to present our latest work "Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics", now hosted on BioRxiv! 🧵 doi.org/10.64898/202... @ralfkurvers.bsky.social @scioi.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social @alexschakowski.bsky.social @dominikdeffner.bsky.social

Proud to present our latest work "Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics", now hosted on BioRxiv! 🧵 doi.org/10.64898/202... @ralfkurvers.bsky.social @scioi.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social @alexschakowski.bsky.social @dominikdeffner.bsky.social

!! New in @science.org !! How do animals learn broad skills necessary for survival in the wild? Our latest study on wild Sumatran orangutans at Suaq provides answers. 1/11 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How 8 years of social and individual learning interact to shape ecological competence in orangutans

Cultural learning permeates human skill and knowledge acquisition. To understand its importance for nonhuman apes, we analyzed just under 7000 records of behavioral bouts of social and individual lear...

science.org

New paper alert! 🚨 How does social information quality impact collective intelligence in human groups? We used immersive 3D experiments to find out! Out now in Nature Comms 🧵👇 Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Payoff selectivity drives collective intelligence during dynamic resource tracking in humans - Nature Communications

Humans rely on complex social learning and collective adaptation to navigate dynamically changing environments. The authors show that human collective intelligence in a dynamic, naturalistic task depe...

nature.com

Now published in @natcomms.nature.com! Using a 3D immersive-reality group experiment, we show how people integrate dynamically changing personal and social cues in realistic environments, resulting in either collective intelligence or maladaptive behavior! Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dominik Deffner@dominikdeffner.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Which processes underlie collective intelligence in naturalistic human groups? In new work led by Valerii Chirkov, we show that payoff selectivity is key in transforming a group of individuals into an intelligent collective 🤝🧠 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY7n... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

Iva Vukušić@vukusiciva.bsky.social · 2w ago

This ridiculous number of applications is, in my view, the result of 2 nightmare developments happening concurrently 1.the precariousness of the job market for young PhD graduates which then fuels further: 2.the AI tools enabling overproduction of proposals. #Research #ERC #ResearchFunding #Academia

How does seasonal scarcity shape cooperation & defection in the use of natural resources? New study from #Pemba shows how seasonal fluctuations lead to illegal resource extraction, shedding light on the enduring human challenge of managing the commons. tinyurl.com/3k79uccd & doi.org/10.1016/j.cr...

Seasonal scarcity and the challenge of preserving natural resources

New study shows how predictable income shortfalls can put shared forests under pressure

tinyurl.com

Very proud of @kirikuroda.bsky.social for preprinting this study on social influence and information cascades in experienced based decision making. osf.io/preprints/ps... @arc-mpib.bsky.social. Great collab with @simyciri.bsky.social @dirkwulff.bsky.social

📣 NEW PREPRINT ALERT! 📣 📝Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... When choosing between options with multiple attributes, what does the brain actually compare - individual attributes or integrated option values? We combined EEG + eye-tracking to find out... and found evidence for the latter 🧠

Fixation-evoked potentials reveal neural signatures of hierarchical value-integration during decision-making

Many decisions require maintaining beliefs across multiple levels of representation, from sampling and integrating information to forming action plans. To elucidate these processes and reveal the neur...

biorxiv.org

New tutorial preprint about simulation-based inference! Shows how to fit a cultural evo model to baby name data using approx Bayesian computation, random forests, and deep learning. Wrote for @eslr.bsky.social but wanted to share with others in @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social! :) osf.io/preprints/so...

Wir suchen Verstärkung für unser Team zum Aufbau eines Ambulanzbereichs für Psychotherapie mit Paaren/Familien und Paartherapie. Gerne mit Interesse, im Rahmen einer unbefristeten Stelle diesen Bereich im schönen Marburg langfristig mitzugestalten. Ich freue mich sehr darauf! Mehr👇🏻

New preprint! 💙 Together with @amandinevisine.bsky.social, we observed that BaYaka hunter-gatherer women and girls flexibly alternate between childcare and subsistence responsibilities during foraging trips, a pattern we call “relay cooperation” osf.io/preprints/so...

New paper 💙 Together with Ayana Tanaka, Shun Hongo, and Akira Takada, we compared early childhood caregiving among !Xun in Namibia and Baka in Cameroon, showing how maternal care and care from others come together across the two hunter-gatherer populations. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Reframing Mother–Child Closeness and Cooperative Caregiving: A Comparative Study of Two Hunter‐Gatherer Populations

Objectives Caregiving during early childhood emerges from a dynamic interplay between maternal and allomaternal contributions. This study aimed to challenge polarized portrayals of hunter-gatherer c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

When is language needed for human culture to accumulate? When observing successful behavior is not enough to recover the mental model behind it! This is an incredibly ambitious project, involving large-scale experimentation, RL and ABM modeling, and computational language analyses.

Alexandre "Blublu" Bluet@blubludoesscience.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New preprint! We investigate the role of language in the transmission of mental models in cultural evolution. Using a transmission chain design with over 2000 participants, we show that only language allows for the transmission and refinement of mental models. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Proud of the whole team, esp of @alexschakowski.bsky.social for putting together this review: Toward a psychology of real-life decision-making. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @mpib-berlin.bsky.social @scioi.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social

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 · 3mo 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