New preprint alert 🚨 ! Check out the full thread below 👇

I’m excited to share our new preprint: A Multi-Level Examination of How Hostility Unfolds During Online Argumentation.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is the first paper to examine how toxicity manifests from belief differences and how they are represented in the human brain.

New preprint out -- the first from my postdoc work @caltech.edu -- excited to share this interdisciplinary collaboration that combines Reddit, Online Chat, and fMRI data!

Thanks also to the rest of our team @ketikagarg.bsky.social, Bo Zhang (no Bluesky), and @pandascholar.bsky.social!

on a personal note, this project has been a big undertaking - venturing into a new field, building a chat platform for real-time interactions (by manifesting my Indian destiny to be a software engineer 😅) & leading an interdisciplinary collaboration. Very glad for it to be out!

overall, this project raises important questions about how online communication unfolds at the interpersonal level, how the nature of interactions & the affordances that structure them reshape how we perceive others & express ourselves, and what that means for societal issues like polarization.

fMRI chat design. and neural representation of receiving toxicity and Dislikes

Finally, fMRI chats with different chat actors show that toxicity and Dislikes serve as evaluative signals, engaging systems for social inference, threat, and rejection, while their amplification is linked to areas related to emotional reactivity

In live dyadic chats, we also show that the degree of belief differences worsens a range of socio-affective outcomes -- meta-perceptions of self, reward/punish decisions, affect ratings -- and the nature of the discourse amplifies these effects beyond ideological distance

We find mild forms of toxicity throughout the datasets but show that people tend to align their toxicity with that of their partners, and toxicity can increase with belief differences and receiving negative social feedback - Dislikes/Downvotes (or the lack of positive -Likes/Upvotes)

schematic for study design

New preprint w/ @fearbrain.bsky.social, Bo Zhang, @aanixel.bsky.social & @pandascholar.bsky.social where we examine online political debates to understand how interactions become hostile using data from Reddit, real-time online chat experiments & brain imaging during chats - osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵

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/

I was set to lead an undergraduate research trip abroad. Then my visa was denied Through flexibility, problem-solving and the generosity of colleagues, I shepherded students through fieldwork remotely.

the amazing @mayankchugh.bsky.social once again powerfully captures the lived realities of inequality in academic mobility by sharing his experiences. this artwork "weighing" Indian and American passports hits really hard -- goes much beyond mobility privileges.

In March 2026, an Anthropic employee released the source code of Claude Code, a wrapper around their large language model that is widely used to generate code in programming tasks. Its thousands of lines of Typescript code contained many hopeful prompts and incantations to shape Claude’s behaviour. Here are some examples: “Report outcomes faithfully”; “Never characterize incomplete or broken work as done”; “Be careful not to introduce security vulnerabilities” (prompts.ts in Anthropic 2026). There is more than a passing resemblance here to the Azande witch-doctor apprentice who, while stirring the medicine, utters: “You medicine which I am cooking, mind you always speak the truth to me. Do not let anyone injure me with his witchcraft, but let me recognize all witches. … Let me be expert at the witch-doctor’s craft so that people will give me many spears on account of my magic.” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 93). In the case of Claude, the incantations appeared insufficient: analysis of the codebase, which according to a company executive was “pretty much 100% written by Claude Code”, revealed severe security vulnerabilities (Townsend 2026).

I was supposed to finish this March 31 and then the #Claude Code leak happened, handing me the perfect opening example

Some of it has been in the works for longer: it's also a version of (part of) my #DHd2025 keynote titled "What makes LLMs so irresistible?"

Read it here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Congratulations!! 🎉 Excited to see all the great things you'll do next ❤️

Forwarding predatory conference invites for co-authored work to your co-authors is a good equivalent of ‘thinking of you’ texts.

New study shows democracy has deep global roots—not just Greece and Rome A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient socie...

Press release for our new paper!

“…people across the world created inclusive political systems, even under difficult conditions…An understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes.”

phys.org/news/2026-03...

People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

📅 Save the date!

Join us next Monday, Mar 9th 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Yasaman Asgari (University of Zurich) on global science landscape.

Hoping to see you all there!✨

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

We review key concepts in social foraging & studies that have applied social foraging(-esque) paradigms to study social behavior and introduce a computational framework that breaks social foraging decisions into asocial and social components as a scaffold for future work.

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

We developed a novel network analysis method to investigate this. 'App-journey networks' quantify the patterns by which users transition across Apps in a phone use session, directly from real-world phone use data.

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

📅 Save the date!

Join us next Monday, Feb 23rd 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Dr. Assemgul Kozhabek (Heriot-Watt
University) on urban mobility networks.

Hoping to see you all there!✨

Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated science because it was ready to accommodate him What could “nerd tunnel vision” possibly mean?

This gets to some important points. There was always something cold, even chilling, about Brockman's "Edge" culture. That feeling still pervades some scientific circles. There's a real problem here that won't go away with Epstein.
www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20...

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

New episode, first of 2026!! 🎉🎙️

A deep dive into metaphor with @sflusberg.bsky.social!

Metaphors delight, provoke, captivate, shock, and galvanize us. What does it say about the human mind that we simply can't escape them—and frankly don't want to?

Listen: disi.org/the-aura-of-...

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉

We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

Chen Center Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in Social & Decision Neuroscience From the Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences

NEW we are hiring 2-3 Postdocs in Social & Decision Neuroscience (SDN) at Caltech. The posting is here www.hss.caltech.edu/about/job-op...
Applications are due 15 February 2026.
Our core group in SDN is RAdolphs, me, DMobbs, JO'Doherty, and ARangel. Our track record of postdoc success is strong

🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉

"Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n

Thrilled to see this paper out, two years after starting our collaboration at @divintelligence.bsky.social