ESLR

Huge thanks to everyone who joined the launch yesterday! 🙌 We’re really excited about your ideas and plans ahead for 2026. If you couldn’t make the event, you can join the society here: www.eslrsociety.com/membershipoin and join our Discord channel: discord.gg/wxMxcXYj

🎉 📣Join today at 1pm GMT to learn about ESLR and get involved!

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📣 Join us Wednesday 14 Jan at 1pm GMT 💻🌍 Early career researcher interested in culture, behaviour, and learning? Get involved, learn about ESLR, and meet others in the field. We'll cover 2026 activities including skill-sharing sessions. 🛠️💡 Join: meet.google.com/sun-ddcz-gky

ESLR Skill Sharing Spring 2026

🎓 Got a skill to share? Pass on your wisdom by hosting a friendly session with the ESLR community online! A great chance to test-run a workshop or rehearse teaching material in a supportive setting. Writing, analysis, academic life… if it's helped you, we'd love to hear it ✨ tinyurl.com/57v7ftd3

New issue published in Phil Trans B @royalsocietypublishing.org: Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures.

Interested in hosting a skill sharing session for our members? Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Save the date! 🗓️ On the 14th of Jan 2026, we will hold our first online meeting after a prolonged hiatus 💻🌍. This will be a friendly, informal gathering for members to meet and learn about ESLR activities for 2026 including our upcoming skill sharing sessions. 🛠️💡 More information will follow soon!

We are open to a range of different topics. Would you like to share a technique you have been using for theoretical modelling or statistical analyses? Do you have visions for improving research practices? Are you captivated by a certain conceptual framework? We would love to hear from you!

Would you like to share your research skills with the ESLR community? Starting next year, we will be hosting regular online sessions serving as a platform of mutual exchange and support among early-career researchers. Please do get in touch if you are interested in hosting a session!

Abstract: A necessary prerequisite for the accumulation of beneficial knowledge, or ‘cumulative cultural evolution’, is the sharing of information via social learning. Yet little work in the field of cultural evolution has examined the mechanisms that support information sharing in the face of exploitative information free-riding and information hoarding. We ran a series of online interactive experiments (N = 716) combined with computational reinforcement and social learning models to test whether the mechanism of reputation-based partner choice can effectively support information sharing. Participants in groups chose whether to (i) engage in costly innovation and (ii) whether to share the resultant knowledge. Sharers received increased reputations for sharing and participants could use reputations to select recipients of knowledge. Study 1 found, in participants from the UK and China, high levels of information sharing but only weak partner choice. Study 2 replicated this finding with various methodological improvements. Study 3 showed that participants used partner choice to exclude non-sharing artificial bots from receiving information. Study 4 found that when partner choice was impossible, preferences for information sharing declined to levels comparable to non-sharing. Overall, our findings provide tentative positive experimental evidence that partner choice can facilitate information sharing and enable cumulative cultural evolution.

This week's Cooperation Colloquium:

Alex Mesoudi @alexmesoudi.com

Experimental evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans

Date: December 5
Time: 15:00 UTC+1 (Vienna) / 9 am ET (NYC)

Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...

Animal culture paper alert 🚨

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

❗❗ 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!

It's hiring season at @iast.fr!

- 2y research postdoc contract
- Full autonomy, you are your own PI
- Awesome multidisciplinary environment
- All social and behavioral sciences welcome
- Seed funding for projects and workshops
- Gorgeous city in the south of France

www.iast.fr/research-fel...

We have an open PhD position (application deadline 9 January 2026) in "Theory of fitness landscapes" at @unibe.ch 🤓⛰️📊👩‍💻🎓: banklab.github.io/positions/

Please share widely!

#QueerInSTEM #DisabledInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #WomenInSTEM #CarersInSTEM #AcademicSky #HigherED

📢🚀 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

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

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...

#CrowCoG is hiring🚨MULTIPLE PAID RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITIONS 🚨for our 2026 field season (May - Sep)! Field and aviary-based positions - come help us study the remarkable tool-making New Caledonian crows. Apply here: bit.ly/3WlxxHE

PhD in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience : College of Natural Sciences : UMass Amherst Engage in research centered on fundamental theoretical questions about cognitive function using multiple experimental methods and data analysis.

I’ll be considering graduate school applications for Fall 2026 – positions are fully funded, typically for 5 years. Deadline to apply to the Cognition program is December 1. Come do science with me in beautiful Amherst, Massachusetts! www.umass.edu/natural-scie...

Another great PhD opportunity: An ERC-funded project on “Children as agents of cultural evolution,” lead by @sheinalew.bsky.social at Durham University. Come do fieldwork with Mayan groups in Belize with her, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, and I! One of three, 3-year PhD positions starting Fall 2026.

📣✨ New ESLR logo? Join our logo competition! Include ESLR, but get creative with fonts, colours, and style. Feel free to add imagery inspired by behaviour, culture, or learning. Send designs to info@eslrsociety.com
by December 1st. 🌍 If selected, you’ll get full credit as the logo’s creator!

📢🚀 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

📣 Interested in cultural evolution and artificial life? Call for abstracts for our upcoming workshop at @alife2025.bsky.social. Accepted abstracts will be presented as flash talks, and are not archival. Deadline is the September 12, w/ rolling acceptance. Details: sites.google.com/view/planetx... 🧪

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!

Post-Doctoral Position on Cultural Adaptation in Forest Management The University of Maine seeks a post-doctoral researcher for a two-year project on human cultural adaptation in forest management, requiring a strong quantitative background and experience in modeling.

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

PhD position in Cultural and Cognitive Evolution at the Department of Psychosocial Science (280431) | University of Bergen Job title: PhD position in Cultural and Cognitive Evolution at the Department of Psychosocial Science (280431), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Sunday, June 8, 2025

My friend Andrea Bender is looking for a PhD researcher in Cultural and Cognitive Evolution.

Sounds like a dream job — you'd get to work on the topic of mushrooms & cognition with excellent people like Andrea at the beautiful city of Bergen, Norway.

Please share!

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Natural History Museum Denmark

We are hiring. The Natural History Museum Denmark seeks a Tenure-track Assistant Professor and Curator in Vertebrate Paleontology.

Duties are collection-based research, curation of collections, teaching and public engagement.

Deadline: 18 May 2025. View full job posting: bit.ly/3XPIQcg

Nature of Intelligence NIBAI-2025: Nature of Intelligence, Bridging Animal and Artificial Intelligence Workshop Dates: 📅 Date: 4–5 September 2025 📍 Venue: The Diamond Building, University of Sheffield, UK 📝 Registration De...

Announcing the ASAB Interdisciplinary Workshop:
Nature of Intelligence – Bridging Animal & Artificial Intelligence
📍 University of Sheffield, UK
📅 4–5 September 2025
📝 Abstracts due: 1 July
🔗 Register & learn more: sites.google.com/sheffield.ac...
#AnimalIntelligence #NeuroAI #BioRobotics
@asab.org

We still have 5 more days to the deadline!! Submit a brief cover letter, cv, and one reference letter! #COSMOSTOKYO2025