Dominik Deffner

I am gonna take the option where I get more time to read, understand and write. maybe that AI can go to committee meetings for me?

Golden eagle on the nest in Finland (by O. Karlin)

🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

📢🚀 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

Finally in my hands! A new book from @mgurven.bsky.social on why we age, and how we can age better, through the lens of evolutionary anthropology💙 Very excited to dive in!

Our fragmentation paper is now finally out! I put some of the dumb quips that didn't make the cut in the alt texts.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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!!

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!

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...

Unfortunate I'm not based in Berlin anymore, but still looking forward to seeing what you're up to :) Have a great start!

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!

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇

www.cell.com/current-biol...

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Charting the evolution of European literature Oleg Sobchuk has received an ERC Starting Grant to study 200 years of European literary evolution

Great news from the @erc.europa.eu today: I received an ERC Starting Grant to study the cultural evolution of literature 🔥

www.eva.mpg.de/press/news/a...

PsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work!

Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :)

#PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky

Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients into Clear Quantities Abstract Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear models, but is more challenging for more complex models with, for example, categorical variables, interactions, non-linearities, and hierarchical structures. Here, we introduce an alternative approach to making sense of statistical models. The central idea is to abstract away from the mechanics of estimation, and to treat models as “counterfactual prediction machines,” which are subsequently queried to estimate quantities and conduct tests that matter substantively. This workflow is model-agnostic; it can be applied in a consistent fashion to draw causal or descriptive inference from a wide range of models. We illustrate how to implement this workflow with the marginaleffects package, which supports over 100 different classes of models in R and Python, and present two worked examples. These examples show how the workflow can be applied across designs (e.g., observational study, randomized experiment) to answer different research questions (e.g., associations, causal effects, effect heterogeneity) while facing various challenges (e.g., controlling for confounders in a flexible manner, modelling ordinal outcomes, and interpreting non-linear models).

Figure illustrating model predictions. On the X-axis the predictor, annual gross income in Euro. On the Y-axis the outcome, predicted life satisfaction. A solid line marks the curve of predictions on which individual data points are marked as model-implied outcomes at incomes of interest. Comparing two such predictions gives us a comparison. We can also fit a tangent to the line of predictions, which illustrates the slope at any given point of the curve.

A figure illustrating various ways to include age as a predictor in a model. On the x-axis age (predictor), on the y-axis the outcome (model-implied importance of friends, including confidence intervals). Illustrated are 1. age as a categorical predictor, resultings in the predictions bouncing around a lot with wide confidence intervals 2. age as a linear predictor, which forces a straight line through the data points that has a very tight confidence band and 3. age splines, which lies somewhere in between as it smoothly follows the data but has more uncertainty than the straight line.

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life?

Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social)
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

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!

A Causal Inference Framework for Climate Change Attribution in Ecology Accurately attributing ecological shifts to climate change remains a significant challenge. Here, we present an accessible causal inference framework designed for climate change attribution in observ...

Really excited to share our new paper on #causalinference & #climatechange attribution out in #EcologyLetters today!

Are you asking "how much" or "if" climate change has impacted your system, then this paper is for you!

🧪🌏🌐🍁🌺🌱🌿
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself.

The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A review of the costs of eye movements Nature Reviews Psychology - Eye movements are the most frequent movements that humans make. In this Review, Schütz and Stewart integrate evidence regarding the costs of eye movements and...

Eye movements are cheap, right? Not necessarily! 💰 In our review just out in @natrevpsychol.nature.com, Alex Schütz and I discuss the different costs associated with making an eye movement, how these costs affect behaviour, and the challenges of measuring this… rdcu.be/eAm69 #visionscience #vision

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate What have we learned 50 years on?

🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago.

@science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Frequency dependence favours social plasticity and facilitates socio‐eco‐evolutionary feedback in fluctuating environments Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Hot on the tail of our Tsimane IGE study comes the theory paper that motivated it! What are the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of social plasticity in dynamic environments? See our new Functional Ecology paper to find out more

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Copying fidelity of functional and non-functional features in ni-Vanuatu children: A transmission chain study Observational learning plays a key role in cultural transmission. Previous transmission chain experiments have shown that children are able to maintain information across multiple generations through ...

I did something similar here. Although, in this experiment, there was a fixed set of items in the beginning and I was analysing how far along the chain they would be transmitted
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Hm, maybe you could do some sort of "survival model" modeling how likely a given item is to be transmitted to the next generation depending on the position in the chain, the condition and features of the item?! The end results of the chain them emerges from transition probabilities.

Recognising, Anticipating, and Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research Online behavioural research faces an emerging threat as participants increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for advice, translation, or task delegation: LLM Pollution. We identify three int...

🚨New paper alert!

"Recognising, Anticipating & Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research"

Online experiments are being polluted by LLMs. We map the threat and fixes🧵

w/ Raluca Rilla, @hiromu1996.bsky.social, @iyadrahwan.bsky.social &
Anne-Marie Nussberger

arxiv.org/abs/2508.01390

🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks?

ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps!

A 🧵

I really hope some ethnologist is observing how psychologists conduct research on LLMs because that stuff can get wild and probably tells us a lot about psychologists.
(Less so about LLMs)

Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution Dietary shifts and corresponding morphological changes can sometimes evolve in succession, not concurrently—an evolutionary process called behavioral drive. Detecting behavioral drive in the fossil re...

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Got Butterflies in your Stomach? I am super excited to share the first major study of my postdoc @the-ecg.bsky.social - Now out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We report a multidimensional mental health signature of stomach-brain coupling in the largest sample to date www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm excited that our preregistration template for simulation studies is now available on OSF!
See below for a brief interview with the Center for Open Science about the template and why we created it..

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.