Alexander Schakowski

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

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

✨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...

It was an honour to welcome Ralf Kurvers, who beautifully kicked off this conference with a keynote talk on collective human foraging in ice fishing. @ralfkurvers.bsky.social

Come work with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself! 3 yr Postdoc on category learning w/ structured, program-like representations. Funded by the www.theadaptivemind.de Excellence Cluster! Deadline is Mar 15th, details 👇 Please share widely 🙏

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Join us in June at @iast.fr Toulouse for a 2-day workshop on social influence and its large scale implications!

Hello! My name is Gabriella and in April '26 l will graduate with my PhD in compcog from VetMedUni Vienna🤩👩🏻‍🎓🦜🐒🐕🇦🇹

With this in mind, I am excited to soon extend my passion for animal behavior/cognition in a post-doc/job position, so any recs/ connections would be greatly appreciated!!
Website below☺️

Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations | PNAS More than 100 historically, archaeologically and ethnographically attested numerical notations have been used over the past 5,000 y; however, becau...

OK, it finally happened! My new article, "Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations", is now out today in @pnas.org. By focusing on numerals' use for communication instead of arithmetic, we have a new tool to assess their efficiency.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In today's modeling class I had a lot of fun trying to reconduce a bunch of different models to the update rule from rescorla wagner :-)

it turns out that - at least for RL, bayesian update, kalman filters and hierarchically gaussian filters - it's "all" in the learning rate definition.

YouTube video by HACID Project Human-AI collectives produce the most accurate differential diagnoses

We have published the second short video of our series on hybrid collective intelligence. This time, @nikoz.bsky.social from @mpib-berlin.bsky.social presents how combining human expertise with AI insights can lead to better diagnostic accuracy in the medical domain.
youtu.be/Xz8wBkDzjjQ

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

📢 New Paper 🚨

Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.

In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.

bit.ly/4kvLOwA

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉

rdcu.be/e24jT

Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

The Culture Conference 2026 programme is out! 🎉

From keynotes to talks and posters, we are excited to share a diverse and interdisciplinary lineup. A big thank you to all contributors.

With the conference coming up in two weeks, we’re very much looking forward to welcoming you in Utrecht 🙌

📣 Applications for the 23rd Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality are now open!

✨Join us in Berlin @arc-mpib.bsky.social June 08–16, 2026, to explore the topic of “Decision Making in the Age of AI”.

✏️ More details + application form (deadline: March 16): www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/res...

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!

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

💡 Our new #preprint is available online!

How do people adapt their decisions when priorities change?
In our new study, we examine how the way people represent value shapes their ability to adjust in multi-goal environments.

🔗 OSF link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

It's a thread 🧵

🚨New preprint! 🚨
"Boosting metacognition in entangled human-AI interaction to navigate cognitive-behavioral drift"
arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01959

Happy to see this new work coming to the surface alongside @cabels18.bsky.social @lorenzspreen.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social and @stefanherzog.bsky.social
🧵

A new theme issue of #PhilTransB examines the mechanisms of learning from social interaction. Read articles for free: buff.ly/K8v43YM

YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine

Imagination in bonobos!

I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org

We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative

youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Across seven incentivized experiments and a large reanalysis, we systematically manipulated the presence and type of post-choice feedback in repeated risky decisions to test whether feedback shapes behavior through learning mechanisms or through anticipatory changes in preferences.

Across seven incentivized experiments and a large reanalysis, we systematically manipulated the presence and type of post-choice feedback in repeated risky decisions to test whether feedback shapes behavior through learning mechanisms or through anticipatory changes in preferences.

🚨WINNER ANNOUNCEMET🚨

EHBEA wants to congratulate @drboothroyd.bsky.social and @sheinalew.bsky.social on earning the 2026 EHBEA Award in Excellence in Public Communication and Outreach👏

@durhampsych.bsky.social
@durham.ac.uk

Very happy that @PNASNews agreed to publish our (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social) response to Prakhar's thought-provoking study! You can find the final version at the link below. See the following tweet for Prakhar's response to our response. Happy to hear your thoughts!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main!

www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...

We will keep you in the loop!:)

The replication crisis shook the discipline of psychology and has led to reforms such as open science and large-scale replication projects. Yet, it is not psychology’s first crisis, and it is likely not the last. In this paper, we look at three major crisis discussions in the history of psychology: discussions in the early 20th century about the possibility of psychology as a natural-scientific discipline; discussions in the 1960s–70s about the methods, relevance and scientific status of the discipline; and discussions in the 2010s about replication. We compare these crises to determine what generates crisis discussions in psychology and how they tend to unfold and be resolved. We argue that, despite differences across these crisis discussions, some fundamental questions about the object of research and proper methods of psychology recur, as do considerations related to epistemology, ontology, ethics and politics. Our analysis indicates that the current responses to the replication crisis, although valuable, are not ultimate solutions because they deflect fundamental questions and postpone the reconsideration of the ideals of psychology as a science.

Recurring Crises in Psychology

"The current responses to the replication crisis, although valuable, are not ultimate solutions because they deflect fundamental questions and postpone the reconsideration of the ideals of psychology as a science."

Open Access: doi.org/10.1177/1089...

#JNeurosci: Results from Hall-McMaster, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @gershbrain.bsky.social et al suggest the entorhinal cortex might highlight aspects of past experiences that can be generalized, allowing us to make effective decisions in new environments https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1492-25.2025

Thanks @msultan.bsky.social !!

The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin Compared to other species, the extent of human cooperation is unparalleled. Such cooperation is coordinated between community members via social norms. Developmental research has demonstrated that ver...

🚨 New Paper Alert!

We investigated the developmental trajectories of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic social norm acquisition among BaYaka and Bandongo in northern Rep. Congo, a community where inter-ethnic cooperation is common. We found that...

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...