Kristen Syme

Open letter from UK university staff: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...

Colleagues based at UK universities: please sign and share this letter to support Gazan students coming to study in the UK, in order to request Governmental deferral of the biometric data requirement and safe evacuation.

Beyond the alpha male Primate studies challenge male-dominance norms

Challenging alpha male’ norms: new study across #primates reveals that power relationships between males and females are less clear-cut than expected. An intl. team including D. Lukas @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social shows that context matters for which sex has power www.mpg.de/24986976/063...

This has also happening at Leiden University (much of what is happening in the US has been foreshadowd by events in the Netherlands_

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Our new commentary on #Dyspraxia is out! We dive into misdiagnosis, lived experiences, identity, and the systemic barriers faced in an ableist world. Read more! 🧵
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans. 
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

Excellent that you've got a project in mind! We'll be submitting it for pub in the near future. Here's the template for using GPT to annotate ethnographic and other texts by Dubourg, Thouzeau, and Baumard: www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

In sum, the innovation of LLMs, in providing low cost and highly accurate annotations, has created the opportunity for human behavioral scientists to investigate the form and function of rituals and other outstanding puzzles of human behavior and culture on an unprecedented scale.

Scrutinizing a sample of disagreements, we found that GPT provided the most accurate responses for 6 vars. For 3 vars, including gender, a 'majority rule' between the two humans and GPT provided the most accurate response. GPT overcoded 3 vars.

Running GPT across the unresolved 1,015 texts, the human coders had only slightly higher agreement and reliability with each other compared to GPT with each human. Although Gwet's ac1 was high for all vars, Cohen's kappa was much too low on 4, indicating high agreement on 0s but low agreement on 1s.

We had GPT help us come to the 'correct' answers by having it provide a rationale for its response. In some cases GPT was wrong, but in other cases, it helped us identify cases that that we humans mis-coded, as these examples with religiousity demonstrate.

GPT performed nearly as well as humans on identifying whether the gender of the faster was a man or a woman, though it performed somewhat worse for identifying 'Both' due to greater ambiguity in e.g., both vs. unknown.

Measuring precision, recall, and f1, we found that GPT annotated as well or better than humans on 5 vars, tended to overcode (i.e., high recall) on 3 vars (tho it performs well on Visions and Knowledge overall), and performed poorly on 2 vars.

Starting with a sample of 225 texts that we came to a consensus on, we found high % agreement and inter-rater reliability between GPT 4.0 and the human annotators. We also found over 90% agreement of GPT with itself on two rounds.

My co-author Caity Placek and I manually coded 1,240 paragraphs on ritual fasting from the HRAF and tested GPT 4.0's ability to annotate the texts and help us resolve discrepancies on 12 variables incl. gender of fasters, cognitive outcomes, and health and social outcomes.

Here's the run down of my talk at #EHBEA2025 entitled 'Analysing the Form and Function of Rituals Using Large Language Models: Fasting'. I illustrate how we can use LLMs to measure the constituent properties of rituals across ethnographic texts to test theoretical models on a large-scale.

James Baldwin: Letter from a Region in My Mind From 1962: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

For anyone who needs a crash course on power and resistance: www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

"Without theory, one can never understand the general underlying mechanisms that operate in many guises in different situations." Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Preprint available here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Now published! Psychological adaptations for fitness interdependence underlie cooperation across human ecologies. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

Science is a form of activism. It is the pursuit of the truth for the benefit of society. Activism does NOT mean putting the cart before the horse and needing findings to be one way or another.

Oh, Michael Gaffney at WSU recently collected some data from Utilla that is relevant to boredom, but it's not published yet.

Great question! I don't recall any specific lit on boredom, but observationally, I've observed children getting bored/frustrated on the islands if someone they're with is doing one thing, but the child wants to do something else.

Important research! War, forced migration, and mental health in youth

Congrats! Very cool!

Meta-analysis of cooperation studies by Jin et al (2024): 'lower conflict of interests was associated with higher cooperation and... implementation of sanctions (i.e., reward and punishment of behaviors) and... allowing for communication most strongly enhanced cooperation.'
#ehbea #culturalevolution

A mega-analysis of functional connectivity and network abnormalities in youth depression - Nature Mental Health This mega-analysis of brain resting-state functional connectivity in young individuals with major depressive disorder scanned at six sites across four countries identified hub regions of the attention...

"We demonstrate the clinical relevance of brain connectivity in youth depression and highlight a critical role of functional hub regions, especially those localized to the default mode and dorsal and ventral attention networks in youth MDD."

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative - Nature Human Behaviour How did human culture become ecologically dominant? Morgan and Feldman re-examine existing theoretical accounts and propose that, contrary to previous belief, cumulative change and high transmission f...

It feels like cultural evolution is going back to the idea that humans are in fact smarter than other animals (which does not seem that crazy indeed…) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Although I don't say it explicitly in this paper (tho elsewhere), the Fitness Interdependence Theory of Cooperation is the broader theory of human social decision-making under uncertainity of which the signaling model of suicidal behavior is a part of

My new theory paper w/ Dan Balliet accepted to Psych Review, “Fitness Interdependence Underlies Cooperation across Human Ecologies” osf.io/preprints/os...