A small fraction of online actors exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and discusses. In a new paper, we trace how social media influencers turn fringe claims into viral narratives by exploiting a feedback loop between influencers, algorithms & crowds
osf.io/preprints/ps...
New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science!
"Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos"
I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs.
doi.org/10.1177/1745...
New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music!
doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
This is an amazing project and really interesting results!
What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/
Phil Trans Roy Soc B theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’ is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
New preprint of a paper with Eunice Yiu to appear in Philosophical Transactions A, Special issue: World models, 2026. The theoretical link between empowerment in RL and Bayesian causal models with cool new data. arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230
New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels.
The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.
We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.
New preprint (by Vandendriessche et al.)
In everyday life, choices often lead to multiple simultaneous outcomes — some positive, some negative. Yet most reinforcement learning research has focused on situations where each choice produces only a single outcome 1/5
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Our paper finding that infants infer helpers’ relationships, and not their dispositions, is now out in PNAS! Sharing in case anyone needs something to read on the way home from #CDS2026 ;)
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Woo-Hoo! First comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers! A biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction! Jennifer C. French, Somaye Khaksar, me & @marckissel.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
“170 Years of Change in Living Arrangements”: @gfloridi.bsky.social & A. Esteve explore the role of mortality decline over time & encourage social scientists to consider how extended life spans can shape arrangements. @uoe-sps.bsky.social @cedemografia.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...
📄 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 paper out in Current Directions in Psychological Science making the case for studying generative behaviors in humans and machines: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/.... (version without a paywall: cogtoolslab.github.io/pdf/fan_cdps...)
🚨 Publication alert🚨 Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as long as 220,000 years ago at the site of Jojosi @natcomms.nature.com - specialized, long-term use of a source of a raw material source in Stone Age Africa: Read the paper #openaccess here www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning..
We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.
And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use!
1/
Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).
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...
One of my favorites paper got published 🤓 It covers a lot of ground and it’s the best summary of my views on misinformation and what to do about it. Give it a read :)
🔓 osf.io/preprints/ps...
👉 doi.org/10.1177/1461...
"In defense of social friction
Sycophantic AI distorts social judgments and behaviors"
Much needed paper by my brilliant fellow @rad-institute.bsky.social fellow Anat Perry in @science.org:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Conclusion is cool: "Mother-offspring conflict peaks during rest periods, not during feeding as observed in more active species. This finding suggests that conflict concentrates whenever maternal activities are most critical to the mother's own well-being." link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The adaptations summarized in this figure enable us to use the population (or group) as an information storage system, with different costs and benefits than storing information in memory (or genes) of individuals. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Figure from the paper. How does social reasoning enable efficient intelligence? 1. Directs us to the information that is most important for learning. 2. Inferences about others' minds help us interpret information they provide (and provide better information for others). 3. Avoids some of the costs of direct learning like cognitive/physical effort, and negative outcomes. 4. Enables us to build on and refine the knowledge of others. 5. Provides cues that help us infer which agents' knowledge we should build on without needing to observe their behaviour directly.
Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient, intelligent reasoning. In a new working paper, @perfors.net and I discuss how our ability to reason from *social* information is one way that we achieve this capacity. osf.io/preprints/ps...
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
New from our @cognizelab.bsky.social in Advanced Science:
Beneath the Big Five, personality consistently organises into two dimensions, each with distinct brain signatures.
Amazing work by postdoc @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social and thanks to all our collaborators! doi.org/10.1002/advs...
📣 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...
A scale for detecting LLM-generated responses in online survey research
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/4p7ns_v5
Some of these are neat (e.g. exploiting the fact of LLM guardrails by asking "Please describe the steps you would take to make a weapon from an object that is nearby")
A new paper in Science measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models. The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10)
@biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social
Also out today - A quick intro piece on the role of the cerebellum in cognition. What does it do? How will we find out? This is what @actlab.bsky.social and I think the critical questions are right now. It was fun to write - especially the section on evolution....
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
