Alexander Schakowski

It would have never been possible without the support of my research group, who advised, listened and helped me all throughout the academic year. Thanks EcoLearn! 👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏼👩🏼‍⚕️

If you are an early-career researcher interested in social learning, culture, or related fields, join ESLR! We are a welcoming, interdisciplinary and international community. Remember, you can sign up for free here: www.eslrsociety.com/membership

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity
🧵 1/8

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Waiting time during admission procedures increases social inequalities in higher education | PNAS Many domains in life require people to wait to access better outcomes, such as waiting in line to access prized tickets for a show, waiting to obta...

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS.

Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Over the moon to announce that, as of last Friday, I’m officially #PhDone! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me along the way, including, but not limited to, my amazing supervisor @thecharleywu.bsky.social, and all members (past or present) of the HMC lab and the @velezcolab.bsky.social 🎓

Congrats Dr. Witt @alexthewitty.bsky.social! I'm incredibly lucky and proud to have you as the first minted PhD student in my group. Thnx to @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, Martin Butz, & Peter Dayan for serving on the committee. Here's to a bright future as a postdoc w @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social 🥂

My first, first-author paper on model-based planning in structured foraging environments is out now in Cognition!

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳

We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Female fertility and infant survivorship increase following lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees | PNAS Lethal coalitionary intergroup aggression is a conspicuous aspect of wild chimpanzee behavior. Evidence indicates that such violence can lead to te...

In 2008, after killing many of their neighbors, Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory. Female fertility then doubled, and infant mortality plummeted. Adaptive violence in our ape cousins, documented in this new paper. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social
learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz

files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

🧠Our new preprint is out on PsyArXiv!

We study how getting more feedback (seeing what you could have earned) and facing gains vs losses change the way people choose between risky and safe options.
🖇️Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

It's a thread🧶:

“A snake with no teeth”: Urbanization shifts perceptions of men who support women’s empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania Achieving gender equality requires the support of all genders, but efforts to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives have been fraught with res…

🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨

We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5

Survey administration schedule across the 12-week study period. Participants completed biweekly surveys (orange) every two weeks, with US participants additionally completing daily surveys (blue) for the first 30 days. Cognitive tests (green) were administered during biweekly surveys at weeks 1, 5, and 9. Gray circles indicate days with no scheduled surveys. Retention percentages show the proportion of baseline participants (N=1978) who were still active at each measurement week (defined as having completed either a daily or biweekly survey at any time after that week)

Diurnal play across Xbox, Nintendo, Steam.

Sample of daily gaming patterns and mental wellbeing for three representative participants. Stacked bars represent total daily playtime across platforms. Orange line shows biweekly mental wellbeing scores (short WEMWBS) measured at six study waves. Participants were selected from those closest to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of total playtime, prioritizing those with the most varied multi-platform gaming behavior. Participant IDs: p9009984081 (25th percentile), p8809196928 (50th percentile), p7162729307 (75th percentile)

We released a pretty cool dataset/preprint today looking at video game play, cognition, time-use and a ton of self-reported psych measures at osf.io/preprints/ps... with @nballou.bsky.social @matti.vuorre.com @thomashakman.bsky.social @rpsychologist.com and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social RRs coming soon

Congratulations to Dr @mariapykala.bsky.social for successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday. Two big themes. 1) Social learning as a two-step process with psychological biases shaping both network formation and social learning given a network. 2) Cumulative cultural evolution in an AI world.

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search

If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

Excited to share our preprint on variability in patch leaving decisions! Check out the 🧵 below

🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.

A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.

A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

Each dyad (a, b) moves through four discrete states over time, represented by coloured circles. The dyad remains in a given state for a certain duration, or "holding time", before transitioning to a new state according to state-specific transition probabilities, indicated by arrows showing all possible (non-zero) transitions. Paintings by Sofia M. Pereira & Judith von Nordheim.

New paper!

We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Inviting collaborators! 🚨

We’re launching PsychLing-101 — an open, community-driven initiative to gather psycholinguistic datasets for cross-dataset analyses and the development of psycholinguistic foundation models.

👉 To contribute or propose a dataset, go to:
🔗 github.com/Data-X01/Psy...

Dr. Ralf Kurvers, from the MPI of Human Development & TU, Berlin!

His work explores how individuals process and share information, how social interactions shape group decisions, and how collective intelligence emerges across species.

Learn more about his work 👉 ralfkurvers.com

Part of a startup project funded by Max Planck Innovation's MAX!mize program, we're developing next-generation software for automated analysis of animal social behavior. We have this opening:
Software Engineer (m/f/d) (80 - 100 %) Behavioral Analysis Platform Development
Details : lnkd.in/ewXgnBmV

❗❗ Just a quick note: We recently discovered an issue with our email system that prevented some incoming messages from reaching us. If you’ve contacted us recently, please resend your message – we’re sorry for the inconvenience!

Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Cultural Dynamics with Bret Breheim

This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go.
youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...

Next up @alexschakowski.bsky.social talking about social foraging.

BaYaka forager and Bantu fisher‐farmer adolescent engagement with intensifying market integration in the Republic of the Congo A substantial body of anthropological research has investigated how subsistence communities engage with market-based economies. In this study, we contribute to this body of work by examining adolesce...

New paper! We found that intensifying market integration in Rep. Congo does not uniformly shape BaYaka and Bantu adolescent behaviour and consumption, and that adolescents may be contributing to shifts in norms regarding the sharing of money.

rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...

What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?