Cultural Evolution, Communication Behaviors, and Analytical Sociology| postdoc at MPI Human Development
Qiankun Zhong
Under group selection, AI complementarity can prevail—because groups that preserve human variation explore more, and perform better over time.
Strong group boundaries, institutions, and norms can act as a safeguard against long-run cultural decline.
This paper is now published. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Using evolutionary models, we compare AI substitutes and AI complements.
We show that in a population with mixed strategies, AI substitution wins with higher efficiency, at the cost of a reduction in group variance.
Inspiring experience working with a group of great researchers. Now it’s the time for us to understand the current social changes and their influence on the information society.
Discussions on abortion are still very much needed, especially right now. Glad to see this paper finally came out. Do we still have the opportunity to do research like this?
It was an awesome conference @thomasfmueller.bsky.social recommended me. I presented our work on the influence of AI substitution on creative industry and knowledge production: arxiv.org/abs/2602.03541 and hopefully will see this fun crowd again at @ehbea2026.bsky.social in Leiden soon!
After two years of trial and error, here are my tips on how to validate your model empirically. When we can't have perfect measures in social science, this is what we usually do and should be careful about: selfmademodeler.wordpress.com/2024/09/24/h...
New preprint with @thomasfmueller.bsky.social Julian Garcia @iyadrahwan.bsky.social: Group Selection as a Safeguard Against AI Substitution. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03541
Qiankun Zhong
A sequence of technological inventions over several centuries has dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing information. Because societies ride on a substrate of information, these c...
New preprint with @thomasfmueller.bsky.social Julian Garcia @iyadrahwan.bsky.social: Group Selection as a Safeguard Against AI Substitution. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03541
Qiankun Zhong
Paul Smaldino
Two weeks left to submit a poster to the multidisciplinary Machine+Behavior conference (Berlin, April 29-30, submit here: easychair.org/cfp/MaBe24)
This is a great opportunity for early career researchers, I'm looking forward to the conference! Learn more about it here: machinebehavior.science
In the past two years, I have put a lot of effort into empirically testing models and had many failed attempts. I wouldn’t call them all failures. To be fair, some are just boring instead of wrong. Bu...
Reliance on generative AI can reduce cultural variance and diversity, especially in creative work. This reduction in variance has already led to problems in model performance, including model collapse...
New preprint with @thomasfmueller.bsky.social Julian Garcia @iyadrahwan.bsky.social: Group Selection as a Safeguard Against AI Substitution. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03541
Qiankun Zhong
Welcome to the forefront of behavioral science in the digital age.
"Information Architectures: A Framework for Understanding Socio-Technical Systems" is in press at npj Complexity. Normally I might wait until publication to share, but given the relevance to our rapidly-changing world, it seemed worth sharing now. osf.io/preprints/so...
This came out of a 2023 workshop at @sfiscience.bsky.social. Our amazing collaborators include @mzefferman.bsky.social, @judithmedia.bsky.social, @elizabethhobson.bsky.social, @kristinalerman.bsky.social, @helenamiton.bsky.social, @culturologies.co, @janalasser.bsky.social, @qkzhong.bsky.social
