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...

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

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/... 🧵

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!

Title page for working paper: "The Varieties of Cultural Selection"

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/...

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).

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-...

Congrats, great to have you in Germany!!

🚨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 🧬

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

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

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

📣 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...

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 ⬇️

📣 Check out the ESLR Skill-Sharing Sessions schedule for Spring 2026!

A series of workshops by the ESLR community on reproducibility, Bayesian modeling, accessibility, and more 🌱

The first one is happening TODAY!

🔗 See the full schedule: www.eslrsociety.com/events

Bonobos and bottlenose dolphins may seem worlds apart, but together they reveal key conditions that foster cooperation beyond group boundaries

🚨Last week to apply for a 3 year postdoc with me and @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, embedded in theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de Focus is on developing innovative experiments and computational models to understand social & cultural learning. Deadline is March 30th 👉 hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni...

I am excited to share that we are opening two fully funded 4-year PhD positions in my group at the University of Amsterdam

The PhD candidates will work on the @erc.europa.eu funded project EMODEV: The emergence of distinct emotions in human development.

Application deadline: 3 May

I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social

Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments.

📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026

Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)

Resource variability shapes the ecology of social information and collective sensing Social information expands individual sensing of resources in dynamic ecosystems, yet why social strategies evolve in resource pursuit remains unsettled. We posit that resource variability along three...

New paper in TREE co-led w @jennakohles.bsky.social: We explore how resource variability shapes the value of social information for maximizing resource gain & minimizing variance. This eco-evolutionary lens helps us explain why collective sensing emerges in dynamic ecosystems!
🧪 tinyurl.com/2rurcry7

Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups - Nature Communications Individual decisions drive the dynamics of collective systems. Here, the authors use an immersive-reality experiment to show that group incentives reduce social information use and improve performance...

Guess you know, but I used HMMs in stan to infer scrounging decisions in this video-game experiment www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?

In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This is an outstanding book, especially for fathers(-to-be)!

@ehbea.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @eslr.bsky.social

Come work with us! And get in touch with any questions you might have about the position, our labs or living/working in Germany #PostdocWanted

🤩PREPRINT OUT! Using our causal model of 👫 growth, we test if model can estimate growth trajectories of pops. of 🚸 of uncertain age using cross-sectional data. Results: our model provide accurate estimates providing a solution for bioarcheological and other contexts!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

✨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...

Many Minds: Seven metaphors for AI If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world of AI. We talk about AI systems variously as c...

I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI.

manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

**Postdoc position in human category learning**

@thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social.

www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yeah, in the intro of the main text, we also wrote that foraging, cross-culturally, is considered a social activity...

The Original Affluent Society? Lessons from 60-Years of "Man the Hunter" Research To mark the 60th anniversary of the 1966 'Man the Hunter' symposium, On Humans is proud to publish the first-ever podcast interview with Richard B. Lee.

It's out: the first ever podcast interview with Richard B. Lee! 🥁

We discuss the 60 year legacy of Man the Hunter conference, including:

The Original Affluent Society
The Dawn of Everything
The choice of the term "Man" in the conference name.

Enjoy!