iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Dr Nick @nmwilkinson.eurosky.social · 12/10/2026

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

a simplified facelike stimulus consisting of three blobs for eyes and mouth on a head-shaped background, and its non-facelike control stimulus with the blobs inverted upside down.

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Cat Hobaiter @nakedprimate.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It’s the most wonderful tiiime of the year! Flint knapping class followed by deer (or tomato) butchering & pot luck! In which we all learn 1. ‘Simple’ stone tools are pretty hard to make; 2. Even an accidental flake is still very (!) sharp; 3. Language helps but not the way you think it might! 🧪🗻🔪

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paolo @paolopalma.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

learning there’s bodies of literature in ethnography debating the ethics of flirting with participants so that they’ll disclose more information…

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Tobias Gerstenberg @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I'm very excited to share a new preprint with you all (5 years in the making). "Making good decisions with counterfactuals" with Ricky Ma, Scott Mueller, and Thomas Icard. We investigate how people combine experimental and observational data to make decisions. 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Sebastian Speer @sebospeer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The Coupled Minds Lab is recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027. Our lab studies how conversations shape the way people connect, change their minds, and learn, using fMRI hyperscanning, NLP, and computational modeling. The deadline is December 1, 2026. More info here: coupled-minds.github.io

coupled-minds.github.io

Coupled Minds Lab

Coupled Minds Lab — social neuroscience of conversation, negotiation, and human–AI interaction.

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Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró) @biotay.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

1/7 Anesthesia across phylogeny From nematodes to humans, anesthesia induces remarkably similar changes in neural activity. And this could provide important clues about the neural foundations of consciousness. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Had my inauguration on Monday and was overwhelmed to see so many wonderful people there. Thank you to everybody who made it; for all your wonderful wishes; for donating to Doctors without Borders; and also for ignoring my wishes and preparing wonderful gifts. <3 Will publish blog post/speech soon.

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Y'all denied her tenure

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tj nightmahr 🧟‍♂️ @tjmahr.com · 07/10/2026

that is a very good purple

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Ecology of Animal Societies @livingingroups.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Social play is key for development in many animals, yet how solitary species with single young acquire playmates has remained a quandary. We unlock this using long-term data from 31 Bornean orangutan mother-offspring pairs in our new publication in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2621225123. 🧵

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paolo @paolopalma.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Does hating yourself for being gay make your sex life unfulfilling? Does an unfulfilling sex life feed back into your negative views about your sexuality? We answer this question and more in this preprint (co-lead with one of our lab's grad students, Sarah Kowall): osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

Does internalized homonegativity lower sexual satisfaction? A longitudinal assessment among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM) in Canada's three largest cities

Purpose: Internalized homonegativity is associated with lower sexual satisfaction among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM). Though internalized homonegativity is commonly seen as ...

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

🚨 TT Job Alert 🚨 Florida is hiring a new TT asst prof in developmental psychology! Area/age open, early/middle childhood preferred. Come for the gators, stay for the awesome colleagues 🐊 Apply here (deadline 10/15): explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/54...

The Department of PSYCHOLOGY at the UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, invites applications for a full-time, nine-month, tenure-accruing Assistant Professor in the field of Developmental Science.
The specific area of research is open but should focus on developmental research in both brain and behavior that complements and expands existing strengths in the department and the university at large, including the development of cognition, perception, attention, memory, language, decision making, emotion, and/or social functioning. Priority will be given to candidates with research expertise in children from early childhood through middle childhood. Research and training in our developmental psychology program encompasses the lifespan; hence, we will also consider candidates whose expertise spans multiple life stages, including childhood. Applicants should have an

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Aaaaaaand if you are interested in studying big team science, collaboration, and/or affective science, Nick Coles will be recruiting a new PhD student for his Social Science Collaboratory! @nicholascoles.bsky.social www.nicholas-a-coles.com/social-scien...

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Nicholas A. Coles, PhD @nicholascoles.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And if you don’t want to do BORING research with Erin, you can apply to join the most psychologically rich team at UF: the Social Science Collaboratory. Pumpkin carving skills still a bonus. We win together, we lose together. And I desperately need a win. 🎃

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

How do we decide whether to go to a party - or text a new friend? If you’re interested in understanding when and why people take social risks, our newest hire Rui Pei will also be admitting a grad student this fall! www.rui-pei.net/index.html

Welcome to the Social Decisions Lab at the University of Florida!

The social world is filled with uncertainty: we can rarely know exactly what others think, feel, or will do, yet we must continually decide whether to reach out, open up, and connect.

At the Social Decisions Lab, we study how people navigate this uncertainty, how their perceptions shape decisions under social risk, and how those decisions, alongside emerging technologies such as Al, influence interactions, relationships, and social networks. Ultimately, our goal is to use this science to strengthen human connection.

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm recruiting a grad student at Florida this fall! If you find boredom interesting, and psychological richness weirdly compelling, consider applying! Pumpkin carving & rock painting skills a bonus. Applications due 12/1, see website for details: www.erinwestgate.com/join-the-lab...

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Brandon Woo @brandonwoo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’m recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at UCSB! I'm looking for someone who's interested in how children make sense of others' actions, minds, and relationships, and/or how children come to feel socially connected to others. Learn more here: folk.psych.ucsb.edu/team/join-th... Please share!

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Chris Martin @chrismartin76.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Optimism isn't just for humans: Bonobos tend to behave optimistically after hearing laughter #socsciresearch #socialpsych New work by Erica Cartmill and colleagues. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We primed bonobos with conspecific laughter and then asked whether they were more likely to treat an ambiguous stimulus as if it were positive. Subjects (n = 4) were first trained to approach rewarded (black) stimuli and skip unrewarded (white) stimuli. We then presented occasional ambiguous (grey) stimuli. Bonobos approached ambiguous stimuli to search for rewards more often after hearing laughter. Our results suggest that hearing laughter induces positive emotions and may thus bias bonobos’ decision making, including foraging or search behavior. While only apes produce human-like laughter, several other non-human animals have contagious play vocalizations. These vocalizations may lead other animals to anticipate positive outcomes, revealing commonalities in the role of positive emotion in behavior and cognition across species.

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Nicholas A. Coles, PhD @nicholascoles.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

New milestone: over $1,000,000 of [unfunded] grant proposals in a single semester. And it's just October. We're just getting started. Big things [not] happening around here. Better keep your eyes peeled [closed] 💅

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Jialin Zhou @jialin-lin-zhou.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

🆕 New preprint: Is “person = man” inevitable? In the matrilineal Mosuo, men and women imagined someone like themselves. In mainstream China, younger participants did too—but girls and women increasingly favored men with age. [osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ejd76_v1] #NewPreprint

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Sundays are for springs! 🫧 On a mission to see the Bats at Ginnie this morning 😎

Dropping deco tanks in the water at Devil’s Run

Cave map to the bats!! Gold line -> roller coaster -> ?? -> hill 400/the Bats intersection

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

Biblically accurate 🍪

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

ps did I mention UF developmental psych is hiring? 👀 explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/54...

explore.jobs.ufl.edu

University of Florida - Details - ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Get yourself colleagues who go out scalloping with you on gorgeous days in September 🩵

youtu.be

Scalloping in Crystal River, Florida

YouTube video by Erin Westgate

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Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

📊 New resource: ISAAC, an open corpus for studying social group attitudes 💬 527M+ Reddit posts (2007–2023) 🧠 Covers race, sexuality, age, ability, and skin tone 🗺️ Validated against Gallup and Google Trends 🔍 No-code or Python/SQL: isaac.psychology.illinois.edu 📖 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.27059

We introduce the Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC), an open, modular, and accessible corpus of 527 million+ English-language Reddit posts selected for relevance to six key social group distinctions based on race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone, covering the 17-year period from 2007 to 2023. A multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline was used to keep irrelevant content in the curated dataset below 10%, both overall and for each social group distinction. Each post was then algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region, along with a suite of validated off-the-shelf and custom semantic labels including moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. We confirm the validity of the resulting corpus through convergent evidence linking ISAAC to macro-level societal trends, such as online search behavior, temporal spikes during major societal events (both nationally and regionally), and long-term shifts in public attitudes. By offering a unified, public infrastructure, ISAAC eliminates research fragmentation and enables seamless replication while supporting diverse empirical workflows at scale. Specifically, ISAAC allows investigators to perform cross-category comparisons, conduct high-precision tracking of long-term temporal shifts in social group discourse, and map spatial variation onto localized public opinion and policy outcomes. ISAAC's fully public, modular pipeline facilitates easy extension of the corpus to new platforms, languages, and social categories. To accommodate various research needs, ISAAC is accessible both without coding through a point-and-click website and labeler web-apps, and programmatically via an SQL playground, a Python package, and HuggingFace.

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Meltem Yucel @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Had a fabulous time in Montreal at #SESP2026. Thank you all those who came to our symposium session on "The Social Nature of Morality: How People Infer Harm, Minds, and Trust." Many thanks to Cristina for organizing it!

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I don’t think everyone realizes how bad things are for US science: For the fiscal year that just ended, the Trump regime withheld $1.4 billion from the National Science Foundation’s research budget, which is about 1/5 of its primary research budget.

nytimes.com

National Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress (Gift Article)

The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants.

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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."

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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)

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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Thank you!!! Couldn’t have asked for a happier day, gonna take some time to get used to saying I’m forty 😅

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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

A tweet by SarahStarberry that says "oh god read the vertical axis" on top of a chart measuring AI models' release dates and model numbers rather than any real capabilities

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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent

Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range

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Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In sum, this work illustrates that considering peer-to-peer transmission of mental health information could be a useful target for interventions aiming to minimise the unintended consequences of mental health awareness efforts. See for instance, this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

“Influencing the influencers:” a field experimental approach to promoting effective mental health communication on TikTok - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - “Influencing the influencers:” a field experimental approach to promoting effective mental health communication on TikTok

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Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Relative to the beginning of transmission, we find that folks at end of transmission (chain position 7) have 71% higher odds of diagnosing themselves and 95% higher odds of diagnosing Vincent with ADHD. Folks also have 23% higher odds of recommending Vincent to seek help. (4/n)

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Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

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Nicholas A. Coles, PhD @nicholascoles.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

When we fake smiles, are we smiling our way to happiness or misery? 🙃 For decades, emotion embodiment theorists have emphasized happiness boosts -- all while emotion labor theorists emphasized misery costs. In this Registered Report, we finally put these ideas side-by-side doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

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Duncan Stibbard Hawkes @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

⚠️ New Paper! 📣 Egalitarianism has been tied to hunter-gatherer subsistence - but is that justified? In synthesising 30 expert commentaries, we argue that the processes underwriting hunter-gatherer egalitarianism appear in most all human societies; though their efficacy is context dependent.

cambridge.org

Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal - Volume 49

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Emerging briefly from my sabbatical to say I had an absolutely excellent 40th bday, doing all my fav things with all my fav people. Cave diving? Check! BBQ & floating? Check check! Dinner & cake with string lights? Triple check!

My college bestie flew all the way from
Seattle to celebrate!!! She hates water but joined our tube flotilla anyway ❤️❤️❤️

Brian & David surprised me with cake and candles at the end of my bday dinner, after a beautiful rising moon and stunning sunset

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Erin Westgate @erinwestgate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I’ve been in BlueSky jail for two months, but I’m back!! (Account password was compromised, took a while to sort out)

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Zanna Clay @zannaclay.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Great apes reassure one another to maintain the peace Our new study shows that friendly touch before stressful events, like embracing, patting and even kissing, promotes tolerance and peace in chimpanzees and bonobos. Some BBC coverage 🙂 open-access paper below! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Great Apes kiss and cuddle to keep the peace, says study

Hugging before stressful events may be an ancient way of building trust, say scientists studying apes.

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Rayna Tang @raynatang.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

pnas.org

Active linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNAS

In daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke...

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