Björn Lindström
Researching (social) learning and cultural evolution at Karolinska Institute, Sweden
- Reposted by Björn LindströmHere’s Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely asking Jeffrey Epstein for “the name and email of the redhead that was here with you.” This is four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.
- Reposted by Björn LindströmVery happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)
- Reposted by Björn Lindström"Social media is like a Skinner box" is a phrase I've heard repeated a lot, but never meaningfully engaged with. We try and do so in this preprint. Behaviorist principles are very useful to understanding digital behavior, but work in this area tends not to be aware of them. So, we provide a primer.
- Our preprint has evolved! v2 of “Digital Behaviourism” is out now with a new title, new co-authors, and a deeper dive into the behavioural concepts that shape our online lives. It’s time to move beyond “screen time” and focus on function of online behaviours. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmReward as drive reduction, the return! This opinion piece on the explanatory and unifying power of the homeostatic reinforcement learning framework is amazingly accessible, despite its technical nature, and extremely insightful 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2
- Reposted by Björn LindströmOur experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.
- Reposted by Björn Lindström"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmNew in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal. Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström📖Published! STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission This framework can be used to infer complex transmission rules🖥️ 🧪 Read more:
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🎉 📣Join today at 1pm GMT to learn about ESLR and get involved!
- 📣 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
- Reposted by Björn LindströmProc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM
- Reposted by Björn LindströmCan humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social
- Reposted by Björn LindströmOn a more positive note, this NN is worth a read. It takes a similar approach to Ashwood, Calhoun etc to explore diff behavioral states using HMM, but here using a hierarchical Dirichlet process to infer number of states www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmMy co-authors and I are happy to present our framework "Collective Intelligence as Collective Information Processing (CIP)." Here we propose decomposing different information processing mechanisms to unify disparate phenomena traditionally classified as "collective intelligence."
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨 New Paper Alert 🚨 "Understanding & Predicting Cultural Change" is accepted at Advances in Experimental Social Psychology! Varnum & I argue that Psychology cannot afford to be blind to time. We need to move from cross-sectional snapshots to dynamic time-series movies. 🧵👇
- Reposted by Björn LindströmAll I want for Christmas is for Sweden to revive its spooky Christmas goat tradition.
- Reposted by Björn LindströmNew preprint: "The Cultural Ecology of Social Media" osf.io/preprints/so... Thread ⬇️⬇️⬇️
- Reposted by Björn Lindström"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology" royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmNew paper out in Phil Trans with Angel Jimenez, Keith Jensen and Lei Chang From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution? royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmVery grateful that our paper was awarded ISCON’s Best 2024 Paper in Social Cognition!! Huge thanks to the fantastic team: Ben Stillerman, @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social , @leorhackel.bsky.social , Damaris Hagen, Nils Jostmann, and @davidamodio.bsky.social 🎊💐
- ISCON is pleased to announce the winner of best 2024 paper in social cognition award, which is: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Paper was led by @davidschultner.bsky.social, w Ben Stillerman, Bjorn Lindstrom, @leorhackel.bsky.social, Damaris Hagen, Nils Jostmann, and @davidamodio.bsky.social 1/4
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨Two postdoc positions @tse-fr.eu @iast.fr 🚨 We are recruiting two postdocs as part of the ANR-funded project ENFORCE. Join me, @giuliandr.bsky.social, & @zhgarfield.com, to study punitive systems across societies. Full time, 2 years, no teaching. Deadline: Jan 23 www.tse-fr.eu/groups/depar...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity 🧵 1/8 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström
My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN - Reposted by Björn LindströmCome and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmFor this reason, we wrote this comment, published yesterday. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... We reason that 1) their data supports rather than rejects the sequence hypothesis, as monkeys and chimps did not perform with any precision in these sequential tasks. 7/n
- Reposted by Björn LindströmJoin us for this talk by @janhaaker.bsky.social on "A functional view on how we respond to others’ pain: Empathy, threat learning and neuropeptides" 11 November, 1pm CET tu-dresden.de/mn/psycholog...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmJust 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!
- 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! 🙏
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨 New preprint 🚨 Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory? In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions. 🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmRe-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- I wrote a chapter on a functionalist account of social identity. IMO, thinking about identity in an instrumental way helps explain a lot of behavior that seems otherwise baffling. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmI'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
- Reposted by Björn LindströmFully-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! 🙏
- Reposted by Björn LindströmVery thought-provoking post by @prakhargodara.bsky.social. Is confirmation bias/positivity bias a statistical "ghost" of model specification? Specifically not including temporally decaying learning rates? The evidence suggests this is not the case and here is why (1/n)
- How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837
- Using an agent-based model (ABM) and a large-scale experiment (based on the innovation task from @maximederex.bsky.social), we find that our capacity for semantic knowledge is crucial for directing exploration toward plausible innovations rather than random trial-and-error.
- In our model, agents start without knowing how items combine. Through success, they build semantic knowledge. structured associations between items and functions, and pass this knowledge to their offspring.
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- Reposted by Björn LindströmWhich processes underlie collective intelligence in naturalistic human groups? In new work led by Valerii Chirkov, we show that payoff selectivity is key in transforming a group of individuals into an intelligent collective 🤝🧠 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY7n... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström"Dunbar's Number" is a zombie that lives forever in the science press it seems. Estimates of Dunbar's Number with 95% intervals, for a range of model specifications (from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... ):
- Reposted by Björn LindströmOur paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmI'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏
- Reposted by Björn LindströmAm slowly making my way through this paper. And it is an impressive body of work by a collection of great researchers. However, I have a couple of problems with it... 1/n
- Benchmarks for Associative Learning Models: osf.io/qsgz8
- Reposted by Björn LindströmThe result of this super cool work with Henrik Olsson, @abhishekr0y.bsky.social, @hdschulze.bsky.social, Stan Rhodes, and Alison Mansheim can now be found online - and we hope you like it as much as we do 😍https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00053-z- Core ideas also summarized below 🔽
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨 We explore the use of cognitive theories/models with real-world data for understanding mental health. We review emerging studies and discuss challenges and opportunities of this approach. With @yaelniv.bsky.social and @eriknook.bsky.social Thread ⬇️
- Reposted by Björn LindströmI am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so... @psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social
- My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨New preprint🚨 osf.io/preprints/ps... In a sample of ~2 billion comments, social media discourse becomes more negative over time Archival and experimental findings suggest this is a byproduct of people trying to differentiate themselves Led by @hongkai1.bsky.social in his 1st year (!) of his PhD
- Reposted by Björn LindströmNew paper in NHB 📄🚨 We ran extensive experiments to show that making the rules of some canonical economic games looser, makes people more cooperative www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media. 🧵 Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited? It turns out, yes!
- Reposted by Björn LindströmWe often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)
- Reposted by Björn Lindström@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised! 3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution 2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions. Please share and apply! www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...
- Reposted by Björn Lindström📢 New preprint! How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810
- Reposted by Björn Lindström@helenamiton.bsky.social and I have a new paper out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Past theories focus on how we evolve complex technologies (jet engines), but neglect cultural innovations that help us operate these technologies (pilot checklist) Paper has tons of examples and new theory!
- Reposted by Björn Lindström🎊 New paper out! In this @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social Forum, we (with @lucasmolleman.bsky.social and @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social) summarize how reward learning can lead to adaptive social learning. We also explore the broader consequences for cultural evolution: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🚄
- Reposted by Björn LindströmEver wondered why you keep going to that restaurant with stale fries? Is it because you went often in the past (perseveration) or because you remember past good experiences better (positivity bias)? Our study out in PNAS investigates the normative basis for these biases www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Björn LindströmWhere do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)
- Reposted by Björn LindströmThe funny thing is animals actually can suffer and we slaughter them by the billions but sure let’s have an existential panic over whether a software program screams when we turn it off
