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Featured Recent Publications

Featured Recent Publications

Reasoning in the Wild: The Public Works of Reason

Mariam Thalos (2026, Routledge). This book challenges the traditional view of reasoning as an individual mental activity, arguing instead that reasoning is fundamentally social. Thalos explores how shared understanding, communication, trust, public sentiment, and collective narratives shape the ways people think and act, and considers how generative AI may influence these processes.

Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action

Sergey Gavrilets (2026, Princeton University Press). Why do people cooperate to achieve shared goals? Drawing on game theory, social influence, cultural evolution, and behavioral research, Gavrilets develops a unified framework for understanding collective action. The book explores how norms, beliefs, social influence, and cultural differences shape cooperation and offers practical insights for promoting social and behavioral change.

Collaborators through Time: How Humans Partnered with Nature, Technology, and Each Other

R. Alexander Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien (2026, Bloomsbury). Spanning 2 million years, this book examines how humans partnered with nature, technology, and each other to shape their world, from evolutionary origins and ancient innovations to the rise of artificial intelligence.

Lakhesis: Consensus Seriation via Iterative Regression of Partial Rankings for Binary Data

Stephen A. Collins-Elliott (2026, Journal of Applied Statistics). A new statistical method and software package for ordering presence/absence data into a best-fitting sequence, with applications in archaeology and other fields working with binary datasets.

Hypergraphs in Ecology Link Non-Equilibrium Dynamics and Conservation

Blai Vidiella, Salva Duran-Nebreda, and Sergi Valverde (2026, Communications Physics). Introduces hypergraph approaches to understanding ecological systems, showing how complex interactions among multiple species can shape ecosystem dynamics and conservation outcomes.

Additional Publications

Cultural Evolution

  • Alger, I., Gavrilets, S., Durkee, P. (2024). Proximate and ultimate drivers of norms and norm change. Current Opinion in Psychology.
  • Andrighetto, G., Gavrilets, S., Gelfand, M. et al. (2024). Social norm change: drivers and consequences. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
  • Bentley, R.A., Carrignon, S., Gaydarska, B., Chapman, J., Buchanan, B. et al. (2024). Modelling cultural responses to disease spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 21(219): 20240313.
  • Bentley, R.A., O’Brien, M.J. (2024). Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions. Antiquity, 98(401): 1406–1416.
  • Bentley, R.A., O’Brien, M.J., Vidiella, B., Duran-Nebreda, S., Valverde, S. (2025). Archaeology and the construction of artifact lineages: From culture history to phylogenetics. Biological Theory, 1–23.
  • Dong, Y., Gavrilets, S., Qin, C.Z. et al. (2024). Kinship can hinder cooperation in heterogeneous populations. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
  • Gavrilets, S., Seabright, P. (2025). The evolution of zero-sum and positive-sum worldviews. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  • Gavrilets, S., Tverskoi, D., Sánchez, A. (2024). Modelling social norms: an integration of the norm-utility approach with beliefs dynamics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
  • Gelfand, M.J., Gavrilets, S., Nunn, N. (2024). Norm dynamics: Interdisciplinary perspectives on social norm emergence, persistence, and change. Annual Review of Psychology.
  • Lipatov, M., Illari, L., Johnson, N.F. et al. (2025). Coevolution of network and attitudes under competing propaganda machines. npj Complexity.
  • Ruck, D.J., Matthews, L.J., Kyritsis, T. et al. (2020). The cultural foundations of modern democracies. Nature Human Behaviour.
  • Shteynberg, G. (2024). The psychology of collective consciousness. Journal of Consumer Psychology.
  • Shteynberg, G., Halpern, J., Sadovnik, A. et al. (2024). Does it matter if empathic AI has no empathy? Nature Machine Intelligence.
  • Shteynberg, G., Hirsh, J.B., Wolf, W. et al. (2023). Theory of collective mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
  • Tverskoi, D., Ember, C.R., Gelfand, M.J. et al. (2024). Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Computational Social Science

  • Collins-Elliott, S.A. (2026). Lakhesis: Consensus Seriation via Iterative Regression of Partial Rankings for Binary Data. Journal of Applied Statistics.
  • Bentley, R.A., Horne, B.D. (2025). Education and climate concern. npj Climate Action.
  • Bentley, R.A., Horne, B.D., Borycz, J. et al. (2024). Cultural evolution, disinformation, and social division. Adaptive Behavior.
  • Bentley, R.A., Horne, B.D. (2025). Perceptible climate warming amplifies how education increases climate concern in the US. npj Climate Action, 4(1): 12.
  • Borycz, J., Horne, B.D., Luther, C. et al. (2025). Response to collective threat: Russian invasion unifies Ukrainians across ethnic, linguistic, religious and geographic lines. Royal Society Open Science.
  • Duran-Nebreda, S., Bentley, R.A., Valverde, S. (2022). Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
  • Horne, B.D., Ruck, D.J., Luther, C.A. et al. (2025). Georgia: Frontier Between Russia and the West.
  • Pitocchelli, J., Albina, A., Bentley, R.A., Guerra, D., Youngblood, M. (2025). Temporal stability in songs across the breeding range of Geothlypis philadelphia (Mourning Warbler) may be due to learning fidelity and transmission biases. Ornithology, 142(1).
  • Rosokha, Y., Lyu, X., Tverskoi, D. et al. (2025). Cooperation under the shadow of political inequality. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.

Social Complexity of Science

  • He, J., Ruan, X., Huang, Y. et al. (2023). Measuring knowledge diffusion across disciplines in AI research. Journal of Informetrics.
  • He, J., Chen, C., Wang, X. et al. (2022). Mapping the social complexity of scientific collaborations: A network analysis approach. Scientometrics.
  • He, J., Liu, Y., Zhang, Z. et al. (2021). Dynamics of interdisciplinary research: Evidence from big data analytics. Research Policy.
  • He, J., Wang, X., Zhang, Y. et al. (2020). Global evolution of scientific collaboration networks in computational fields. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
  • Valverde, S., Vidiella, B. et al. (2025). Structural changes in gene ontology reveal modular and complex representations of biological function. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 42(6): msaf148.