Ketika Garg

YouTube video by Valerii Chirkov First-Person Perspective of the Voluntary Payoff-Sharing (VP) Condition

Which processes underlie collective intelligence in naturalistic human groups?

In new work led by Valerii Chirkov, we show that payoff selectivity is key in transforming a group of individuals into an intelligent collective 🤝🧠

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY7n...

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

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?

Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social)

Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Larger scientific teams produce more impactful breakthroughs + patents

I wrote a paper with 4 principles to optimize large scientific collaborations based on the science of cooperation & collective intelligence: osf.io/preprints/ps...

And a substack summary: powerofus.substack.com/p/four-princ...

🚨New preprint🚨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time

Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves

Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD

I am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so...
@psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social

Everytime I visit a European country that turned the world upside down, colonized millions and whatnot for *spice*, I just have one question: what did y'all do with that spice....???? Because it ain't in the food????

Why science needs outsiders - Works in Progress Magazine Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs.

“Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.”

worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

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...

Rituals as a stag hunt game?! To the top of the reading list! 🤩

A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making Recent research from economics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and marketing is increasingly interested in the idea that people face cognitive costs when making decisions. Reviewing ...

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄

Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney)

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

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

The Evolution of Scientific Credit: When Authorship Norms Impede Collaboration Scientific authorship norms vary dramatically across disciplines, from contribution-sensitive systems where first author is the greatest contributor and subsequent author order reflects relative input...

New preprint from @tobyhandfield.bsky.social and me!

We analyze authorship order norms from two perspectives: (1) why do disciplines have different norms and (2) do those different norms affect what kinds of collaborations take place.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.07364

Just 1 week left to apply! 🙏 Pls share with anyone you think might be interested. If there are any Q's, get in touch!
👉 3x PhD position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 2yr Postdoc position: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes.

This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

this is BEAUTIFUL!

Super excited for our CogSci paper on the dynamics of conversation led by @helen-schmidt.bsky.social and @clairebergey.bsky.social !

New paper!

Managing speed-accuracy tradeoffs is an important part of commonsense psychology. But how do we do it in groups, where no single person controls decision speed?

The two teams below need to make a decision — and it probably feels obvious that the green team will take longer.

But why?

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. People think about the ties between other people, including ties among individuals to whom they are not themselves directly connected. These “cognitive social networks” have rarely been studied. 1/

🚀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....

Applied physics and mathematics The highlights include but are not limited to the research areas of electronics, optoelectronics, computing technologies and theories, soft matter physics, ...

🚀 Our last paper on leadership dynamics in open-source software teams has been featured in the Editor's highlights at @natcomms.nature.com

www.nature.com/collections/...

Congrats :))

Basal ganglia deep brain stimulation restores cognitive flexibility and exploration-exploitation balance disrupted by NMDA-R antagonism - Nature Communications Deep brain stimulation of the basal ganglia restores cognitive flexibility and rebalances exploration disrupted by NMDA receptor antagonism in nonhuman primates, offering insights into the neural basi...

This is fantastic, causal work demonstrating the basal ganglia’s role in explore-exploit decision making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"One obvious lesson from all this is that, rather plausibly, we today have some convictions and conceits that educated people of the future will label as crackpottery."

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social

Highlights ⬇

Political expression of academics on Twitter - Nature Human Behaviour An analysis of nearly 100,000 academics on Twitter reveals strong progressive stances on climate and social issues, driven by a small, vocal subset. The study highlights potential gaps between academi...

A large-scale study of academics’ tweets shows disparities in who shapes academic discourse and how it reaches the public. @prashantgarg.bsky.social @trfetzer.com @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social
#AcademicTwitter #ClimateAction
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human murmuration: Group polarisation as compression in interaction-language dynamics captured by large language models New technologies enable a social psychology that sees individuals and society as co-constitutive elements of a complex system. Using the metaphor of a murmuration—a loosely organized, locally respo...

"As super-Starlings, our human murmuration
takes place not in air, but in social information systems, where behaviour leaves traces in the cognitive environment of language by which intelligence becomes embedded again in the action environment (it is stigmergic)."
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below.

First, up "mountain calendars"...

The Guardian has an 'explainer' about the India-Pakistan conflict that manages to avoid stating that the border between the countries was originally drawn by an Englishman who had never been to India and signed off on in a hurry by Lord Mountbatten because he had to get back to Britain for a party.