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What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
Current theories from biosocial (e.g.: the role of neurotransmitters in behavioral features), ecological (e.g.: cultural, political, and institutional conditions), and interpersonal (e.g.: attachment) perspectives have grounded…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
Experimental work regularly finds that individual choices are not deterministically rationalized by well-defined preferences. Nonetheless, recent work shows that data collected from many individuals can be stochastically rationalized by a…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
We study an opinion formation model that takes into account that individuals have diverse preferences when forming their opinion regarding a particular issue. We show that the system exhibits a phenomenon called "diversity-induced…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
We propose a society-first theory of normative appropriateness where individuals, modeled as pre-trained actors with cognitive architectures analogous to Large Language Models (LLMs), generate behavior via predictive pattern completion. Our…
The outcomes of elections, product sales, and the structure of social connections are all determined by the choices individuals make when presented with a set of options, so understanding the factors that contribute to choice is crucial. Of…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
In studies of cultural differentiation, the joint mechanisms of homophily and influence have been able to explain how distinct cultural groups can form. While these mechanisms normally lead to cultural convergence, increased levels of…
Mixture models are often used to identify meaningful subpopulations (i.e., clusters) in observed data such that the subpopulations have a real-world interpretation (e.g., as cell types). However, when used for subpopulation discovery,…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…
Decision-making on networks can be explained by both homophily and social influence. While homophily drives the formation of communities with similar characteristics, social influence occurs both within and between communities. Social…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with…
What role does culture play in determining institutions in a country? This paper argues that the establishment of institutions is a process originating predominantly in a nation's culture and tries to discern the role of a cultural…