Alexandre "Blublu" Bluet

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone?

Our new preprint, led by
@anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social
shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days !
If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September):
psl.eu/agenda/collo...

🎊 New paper out! In this @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Forum, we (with @lucasmolleman.bsky.social and @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social) summarize how reward learning can lead to adaptive social learning. We also explore the broader consequences for cultural evolution:
www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🚄

💥 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! 🤝

🧵👇

Postdoc in agent-based human-earth system modelling

We are looking for a modeller with experience in agent-based or human earth system modelling and with interest in transdisciplinary sustainability science as part of the Anthropocene navigator project in a two-three year position in Stockholm.

The second @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social poster from the lab is by fantastic PhD student Shen Tian. Using modeling and experiments, he investigated the key role of semantic knowledge in a complex innovation task (originated by @maximederex.bsky.social). On Thursday, poster #86

I'm presenting a poster at #RLDM2025 this Thursday in Dublin!

I'm on Poster Session 3:
Poster #14: Language allows culture to improve mental models 💭

Please find me if you want to talk cultural evolution & language!

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 ⬇

Open‐Ended Technological Evolution: The Co‐Evolution of Invention and Cognitive Technologies Open-ended technological evolution is the result of the co-evolution of invention and cognitive technologies that enhances our cognitive capabilities and generates a feedback loop of ever-expanding t....

New paper out in Topics in Cognitive Science! "Open-Ended Technological Evolution: The Co-Evolution of Invention and Cognitive Technologies" 🧵
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Postdoctoral Researcher in social/cognitive neuroscience with focus on social learning Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) is seeking a highly qualified postdoctoral researcher.

Join our @erc.europa.eu funded lab @ki.se! We're hiring a postdoc to explore how humans learn from each other — with fMRI, modeling, & behavioral experiments. 🧠👫
A chance to lead cutting-edge work in social neuro & computational psychology.
Apply: shorturl.at/GJQuW

Illustration showing a graduation ceremony, with speaker addressing graduates: “Let the example of my fluke success guide nearly all of you to crushing disappointment”.

Success in academia often has more to do with luck, patronage and the job market than “hard work”.
Good academics acknowledge this.
I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.

Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Cover of the American Journal of Psychology, Volume 137, Issue 3, Fall 2024 Red background with abstract wavy lines crossing the middle of the cover and list of editors in the bottom left corner.

One way to pass on our own causal understanding about how a physical system works is to provide a verbal explanation about it. Read in American Journal of Psychology Vol. 137, Iss. 3. @neurogiovanni.bsky.social @blubludoesscience.bsky.social scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ajp/arti...

Quote: " In sum, leader-directed teaching of opaque cooperative norms would be a mutually beneficial strategy, where the costs incurred by influential teachers are, at least partly, outweighed by the long-term benefits of cultivating cooperation within the group."

Mosaic plot illustrating the relationship between evidence for teaching and non-teaching social learning, based on a binary researcher-coded measure of teaching. "Although instrumental cultural transmission frequently occurs through both teaching and non-teaching social learning, opaque cultural information is predominantly transmitted through teaching, with relatively fewer instances of non-teaching social learning."

With @sheinalew.bsky.social: Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, in @naturecomms.bsky.social

#evolution #culture 🧪 #LeadSciSky #CultEvo

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cover of the American Journal of Psychology, Volume 137, Issue 3, Fall 2024 Red background with abstract wavy lines crossing the middle of the cover and list of editors in the bottom left corner.

Announcing American Journal of Psychology Vol. 137, Iss. 3! Featuring contributions from @neurogiovanni.bsky.social , @blubludoesscience.bsky.social , & more! Plus, book reviews, including review & response on "Smart Management" @mitpress.bsky.social scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ajp/issu...

CE postdoc alert 🚨

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

Postdoc opening in beautiful Stockholm 🇸🇪!
Join us at Karolinska Institutet to explore how interdependent traits shape social learning and cultural evolution.
🧠 Behavioral + computational work
🤝 Work w/ labs in Amsterdam @lucasmolleman.bsky.social & Leuven

Details: shorturl.at/Wzy9o

Great opportunity to study social learning and cultural evolution within a wonderful team & lab at the @ki.se in Stockholm!
You can contact me (or @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social
directly) if you have any questions!

Postdoctoral Researcher in affective learning and decision-making Do you want to contribute to better health for everyone? Our research group, led by Andreas Olsson at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is seeking a qualified and motivated postdoctoral researcher.

post doc position on "affective social learning" in Andreas Olsson's group at Karolinska Institute. Recommended! ki.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

How Sonic DNA Connects Generations of Music Songs have a far more complex and concealed musical history, spanning genres, cultures, and even centuries.

pudding.cool/2025/04/musi...

A circular dendrogram (phenetic tree) of knots, made using the ggtree package in R. A text-readable and high-resolution PDF-version of the tree is available as a supplementary material.

Pleased to see our work published:

The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance

We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies.

Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter.

doi.org/10.1017/S095...

🚀COSMOS is BACK!!!💫 The Computational School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) will take place in RIKEN, Tokyo, between 29 Sept - 3 Oct, organised by me and fantastic @thecharleywu.bsky.social ! Application deadline: 25th April. For more details see 👉️ cosmossummerschool.github.io

🚨 New preprint out! 🚨

How do people make moral judgments as third parties? 👀 We show how two motivations—inequality aversion (fair = moral) ⚖️ and the common-is-moral heuristic (frequent = moral 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧—interact to shape evaluations 🧵👇

📄 osf.io/preprints/ps...

📝New paper in iScience (@cp-iscience.bsky.social) by myself and a wonderful cast of co-authors (sadly not on bluesky). We investigated the neural circuit involved in watching other people build tools! 🧵 (1/8) [link: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.111870]

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at The University of Edinburgh Looking for a new job opportunity in academia? Check out this job opening for a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on jobs.ac.uk!

Job offer! 3-year PDRA studying archaeological content on social media from a cultural evolution perspective. Based at Edinburgh, supervised by @chiara-bonacchi.bsky.social and myself -project "Weaponised Pasts: The Evolution Of Heritage-based Hostility On Social Media’. Please share!
bit.ly/3QCXUFS

The_Happy_Hob - RIP Follow this guy Watch The_Happy_Hob's clip titled

It happened to Hob on the last game last boss of a Dark souls trilogy no-hit run
clips.twitch.tv/DrabQuaintZu...

Interesting article by @blubludoesscience.bsky.social and colleagues on social learning mechanisms.

#ehbea #culturalevolution #psychscisky

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study Neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience; Social sciences

Even better with an actual clickable link: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study Neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience; Social sciences

Of course! I thought the doi would've been clickable.

Here: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

For more details and information about this study, check out the open-access (cool!) paper [link: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.111870]. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! (8/8)