Alexander Schakowski
@alexschakowski.bsky.social
Postdoctoral Fellow at MPI for Human Development, Berlin. Interested in human foraging, social decision-making, and collective intelligence.
⚠️ New Paper! 📣 Egalitarianism has been tied to hunter-gatherer subsistence - but is that justified? In synthesising 30 expert commentaries, we argue that the processes underwriting hunter-gatherer egalitarianism appear in most all human societies; though their efficacy is context dependent.
Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal - Volume 49
cambridge.org
🚨 Our new lab paper, led by @amandinevisine.bsky.social, examines exploration, group composition, and play activities among BaYaka children and teens living in a village context! Amandine is currently on fieldwork following up on this for her PhD 🎯 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Congolese BaYaka children's learning and exploring in a village context
Childhood is a key period for acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge and skill. Hunter-gatherer children, such as the Congolese BaYaka, learn a…
sciencedirect.com
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
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 agoWhich 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...
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
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
OSF
osf.io
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...
OSF
osf.io
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
Books & Brains is heading into the next round with a new story. 💐🐁
Books & Brains@books-and-brains.bsky.social · 2mo ago🚨 Update 🚨 The next featured story is "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. 💐🐁 Now is your chance to read it before the full-length article is published soon. The story examines what happens when a person's intelligence is suddenly and dramatically boosted through science. 🧪
My research group will be moving to and growing at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in early 2027 with support from @carlzeissstiftung.bsky.social! Keep an eye out for upcoming graduate student and postdoc opportunities @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @livingingroups.bsky.social
Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung@carlzeissstiftung.bsky.social · 2mo agoDurch die Förderung im Programm CZS Nexus können neun Postdocs eigene #Forschungsgruppen an der Schnittstelle verschiedener #MINT Disziplinen aufbauen. Wir wünschen allen #CZS Geförderten viel Erfolg! ▶️ www.carl-zeiss-stiftung.de/themen-proje...
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 agoNew 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...
🚨 Paper Alert 🚨 Searching for concepts 🦓⚽ in memory 💭 is fundamental to our cognition. But how exactly do we represent 🗺️ and navigate 🏃♀️through concept spaces? osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/adwzp
OSF
osf.io
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
sciencedirect.com
The special issue is out, including our contribution: "Social information about affective states in a human-altered world." Led by @lucahahn.bsky.social, @jackdawjordan.bsky.social & @margauxvanhussel.bsky.social. tinyurl.com/hyhfvmjn. @wildanimals.bsky.social @uniexecec.bsky.social.
Social information about others' affective states in a human‐altered world
Faced with anthropogenic change, animals now encounter challenges different from their evolutionary past. To cope with such challenges, animals may use social information about others' affective stat...
tinyurl.com
Journal of Animal Ecology@animalecology.bsky.social · 2mo ago🚨 new Special Feature! 📝 the collection, edited by David Fisher and Natalie Pilakouta, aimed to explore how organisms plasticly alter their social behaviour in response to environmental variation. 🐒 read the full collection here: buff.ly/iWJVFw5 🎙️ and listen to the podcast here: buff.ly/qGycB98
Thanks for those brilliant questions, Ricardo. It was super fun to chat with you!
The Dissenter@thedissenteryt.bsky.social · 2mo agoNew episode (1289), with Dr. Wataru Toyokawa (@watarutoyokawa.bsky.social). We talk about social learning, collective decision-making, and the wisdom/madness of crowds. #CognitiveScience #Science YouTube: youtu.be/e6IhPGl0BBw Podcast: bit.ly/3RDehXr
🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇
Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration
Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.
science.org
🚨 Out now in TICS How can language models help cognitive science? @ruimata.bsky.social & I outline 5 uses: mapping research fields, formalizing theories, cleaning up constructs & measures, predicting behavior across tasks, and capturing environmental variation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question
New blog post! Odds ratios are...a bit weird. Here I explain two problems (interpretation, non-collapsibility) and provide some simple recommendations for improved reporting. www.the100.ci/2026/07/30/r...
Reviewer notes: Odds ratios are really odd
When psychological researchers investigate binary outcomes, they routinely report odds ratios to quantify the strength of an effect or an association. This is quite understandable given that psycholog...
the100.ci
Out now in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Thank you to all peers and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback during the process!
A demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning | PNAS
We develop a demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning that formalizes our understanding of when and why individuals should preferent...
pnas.org
Alejandro Pérez Velilla@apvelilla.bsky.social · 8mo agoNew preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so... This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning. Now out in PNAS, led by the incomparable @apvelilla.bsky.social . We use modeling to explore conditions for the (cultural) evolution of parochial (and anti-parochial) learning biases. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
🍄 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🍄 I, and others, have previously drawn a comparison between the classic “cost-avoidance” argument for social learning and the central idea of resource rationality... (1/8)
Join our online @eslr.bsky.social skill-sharing session by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social this Thursday, 4PM CET to learn more about Bayesian likelihood free inference. Details below 👇
ESLR@eslr.bsky.social · 3mo ago🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...
Want to do a PhD to work on models of opinion dynamics and the inequalities of information flow, with an emphasis on climate change and climate policy? Apply by October 15 to work with Ago Merico and myself, based at @leibniz-zmt.de in Bremen, Germany. www.leibniz-zmt.de/en/vacancies...
Doctoral candidate (gn) - WG Systems Ecology
Das Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung (ZMT) erforscht tropische und subtropische Küstenökosysteme und ihre Bedeutung für Natur und Menschen erforscht.
leibniz-zmt.de
Doing a short workshop about simulation-based inference on Thursday for @eslr.bsky.social! Come hang out :)
ESLR@eslr.bsky.social · 3mo ago🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...
out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Chaz Firestone@chazfirestone.bsky.social · 3mo agoYou press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe
🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...
