Alexander Schakowski

📢🚀 Are you an early-career researcher working on anything related to culture, behaviour or learning? 🧠🌍 Join ESLR, an interdisciplinary research community! We have a NEW website and our membership is now FREE. 👉 Sign up here to get updates and become a member: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence - Communications Psychology Adolescents’ choices are influenced by others. A social risky choice experiment and Bayesian modelling reveal that age differences in internal uncertainty, being unsure how to choose, relate to differences in susceptibility to social influence.

😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

COSMOS2025 kick started!! And we’ve got the generous support from #ESLR community for the ESLR travel award!! Join ESLR if you are interested in social learning, cultural evolution, collective behaviour, and beyond!!

🚀👩‍🚀 COSMOS 2025 is coming to Tokyo in less than a week! Me + @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social + our amazing faculty👇 can’t wait to welcome everyone to RIKEN.
📣 Attendees: check your inbox for info about travel, accommodations, mentorship groups, guest access, etc...
cosmossummerschool.github.io

Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ?

Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration.

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Transmission networks of long-term and short-term knowledge in a foraging society Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

💙New paper!💙

How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society?

With @danielredhead.bsky.social
we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

After a very fun summer (👇), some personal updates: I am moving to @mpib-berlin.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social in Berlin next month with a Humboldt Fellowship @humboldt-foundation.de to join @ralfkurvers.bsky.social for some exciting collective decision-making work😁🐟🚶‍♀️

Any Berlin/DE tips welcome!

Are you studying animal sociality? Confused about the "non-independence" of social network data: what on earth are they? are they threatening your results? should you attempt to get rid of them?

A thread summarising a part of our new paper (ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...).

🚨 New preprint 🚨

What are the reasons underlying human choice in the face of risk?

Excited to share new work with Kamil Fulawka and Ralph Hertwig, establishing #LLMs as a scalable solution to uncovering the reasons behind people's choices from free text reports.

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

ESLR is currently undergoing a transition, and a new committee (@alexschakowski.bsky.social, @ahnisnaahsi.bsky.social, @katebonner.bsky.social, @lucahahn.bsky.social, @mariapykala.bsky.social) is working on reinstating its presence and shaping its future. Please feel free to get in touch!

Deadline tomorrow!

💥 Our new paper (with ‪@lucasmolleman.bsky.social and ‪@bjornlindstrom.bsky.social‬) is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com‬ 🥳 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠 Here, we advance a novel RL account—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—that explains how people learn to learn from others! 🤝

🧵👇

Great explainer for our new @nathumbehav.nature.com paper!

We've wrapped the first run of Unraveling Behavior! 🎙️ Now planning next steps—your feedback helps shape the future + funding.
👉 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆: survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/25...

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

💥New postdoc position! 💥

Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution.

Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social
📍 Stockholm
More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power

paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122

press release https://www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyond-the-alpha-male-150495-x?c=2249

The deadline has been extended until July 16th!

👉 PhDs: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

🤩IT'S A PREPRINT 😍
Adolescents' social sensitivity isn't a bad thing—it's adaptive! In our new study, led by amazing Andrea Gradassi @connectedmindslab.bsky.social, we show that teens learned to copy successful peers faster than adults in a new multiplayer exploration task.
osf.io/preprints/os...

Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability Animals often balance asocial and social information strategically, adjusting when and from whom they copy based on context. Yet the cognition driving this dynamic—and its broader implications—remains...

👇 New #preprint combining computational models with zebbie data: "Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability".

🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧵1/n

🚨 3-year Postdoc Position at MPIB Berlin @mpib-berlin.bsky.social (deadline: 15 July)

We're hiring a postdoc to study why some citizens in Germany have become disillusioned with liberal democracy and shared reality, and how these shifts relate to social media use and broader societal polarization.

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

I'll be presenting two posters at #RLDM2025 in Dublin🇮🇪 – June 11, Poster Session 1:

🌀 Poster #19: How selective attention benefits and hinders learning in complex environments.

🏞️ Poster #18: NorMARL - a framework for sustaining shared resources through norm internalization.

Preprint @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social arising from @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social animal welfare workshops. How can we develop a better error culture in animal biologging where we can learn from our, and others, mistakes and experiences?

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

AI generated image showing flock of sheep, shoal of fish, flock of birds and swarm robots

1/3

www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

PhD studentship! Comparative Analysis and Modelling of Collective Behaviour in Natural and Artificial Systems.

**this scholarship for UK residents only, as defined by UKCISA regulations**

Details below! Please RT

(AI-generated image)

Baboons walk in line for friendship, not survival, new study finds Researchers at Swansea University have discovered that baboons walk in lines, not for safety or strategy, but simply to stay close to their friends.

New paper in @behavecol.bsky.social (link: academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...)
led by PhD student @marcofele.bsky.social using hard-won data from our amazing baboon team. Our @swanseauni.bsky.social press release:
www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office...
We introduce the idea of a "social spandrel".....

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Pan-African metapopulation model explains Homo sapiens genetic and morphological evolution Emerging evidence has challenged the traditional view of a single-region origin for Homo sapiens, suggesting instead that our species arose and diversified across multiple geographically distinct popu...

🚨NEW PAPER from the @eegcam.bsky.social!🚨I have never been as proud of something as of the work that finally we can share today: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - we show how a climatically driven Pan African meta population model explains our species genetic and morphological diversity 🧬💀

🔷New in Biological Psychiatry🔷

**Old Strategies, New Environments: Reinforcement Learning on Social Media**

In this Review, we argue that the computational framework of Reinforcement Learning can help us understand social media behaviour:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨New podcast episode!!🚨

Ralph Hertwig calls for a shift from nudging to boosting—empowering people with the skills to make informed decisions. It’s a transparent way to strengthen agency in the face of challenges like misinformation, climate change, and more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9r-...