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Our new paper suggests that transmissible sender characteristics, such as the ability to persuade people and communicate effectively, might play a more significant role in cultural evolution than how we learn and from whom.

I finally gave my Professorial Inaugural Lecture. A great night with friends, family, & colleagues, & sharing the stage with a good friend @cmcgettigan.bsky.social🥂 Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTG... Bookmarks flag both my lecture and @celiaheyes.bsky.social’s (far more entertaining!) intro

All Souls College, University of Oxford is advertising a senior academic position in philosophy. Closing date: 19 September 2025. #PhilJobs, #Philosophy, @jowolff.bsky.social, @birchlse.bsky.social www.asc.ox.ac.uk/senior-resea...

Latest from the lab: our theory of how paranoia can be about social things, without dedicated social processing @juliasheffield.bsky.social, Santiago Castiello, Rosa Rossi-Goldthorpe, @praveensuthaharan.bsky.social and @celiaheyes.bsky.social nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

💥New postdoc position! 💥 Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution. Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social 📍 Stockholm More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

We introduce a mathematical model of cultural evolution to study cultural traits that shape how individuals exchange information. Current theory focuses on traits that influence the reception of information (receiver traits), such as evaluating whether ...

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

Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent research demonstrating that disagreement prompts competent responses by young children across several metacognitive domains (confidence monitoring, information search, and source monitoring). We then propose a mechanistic model of how disagreement facilitates metacognition. We localize one main source of children’s metacognitive limitations in their still-developing capacities to reason about alternative possibilities, which manifest in an overly narrow focus on one hypothesis. Disagreement increases the child’s likelihood of representing alternative hypotheses, thereby promoting improved metacognitive reasoning. The broader proposal is that, through repeated experiences of disagreement, children become better at representing alternative possibilities even when reasoning on their own, leading to metacognitive development.

Happening tomorrow at @blavatnikschool.bsky.social: The Public Philosopher — a day celebrating @jowolff.bsky.social's extraordinary career. In-person registration is full, but you can still join us online! 👉 bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/publi... Would love to see you there!

I am advertising 2 positions in language evolution with my group at ‪‪@dondersinst.bsky.social: 📢 Fully-funded PhD position (Robotics/AI 🤖) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... 📢 Postdoc position (Virtual Reality 🎮) www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Deadline for applications is August 14th. Please RT! :)