@ketikagarg
Postdoc@Caltech. Makes games and models and kadak chai ☕. Individual decisions ↔️ social interactions↔️collective behavior. Enjoys books and podcasts on science & history. Spends too much time in etymology rabbit holes. Also goes by Ket. ketikagarg.com 🇮🇳
📅 Save the date!
Join us next Monday, Mar 9th 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Yasaman Asgari (University of Zurich) on global science landscape.
Hoping to see you all there!✨
✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
We review key concepts in social foraging & studies that have applied social foraging(-esque) paradigms to study social behavior and introduce a computational framework that breaks social foraging decisions into asocial and social components as a scaffold for future work.
✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
We developed a novel network analysis method to investigate this. 'App-journey networks' quantify the patterns by which users transition across Apps in a phone use session, directly from real-world phone use data.
The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?
📅 Save the date!
Join us next Monday, Feb 23rd 11 AM ET, for another exciting seminar with Dr. Assemgul Kozhabek (Heriot-Watt
University) on urban mobility networks.
Hoping to see you all there!✨
This gets to some important points. There was always something cold, even chilling, about Brockman's "Edge" culture. That feeling still pervades some scientific circles. There's a real problem here that won't go away with Epstein.
www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20...
Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?
These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.
So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...
New episode, first of 2026!! 🎉🎙️
A deep dive into metaphor with @sflusberg.bsky.social!
Metaphors delight, provoke, captivate, shock, and galvanize us. What does it say about the human mind that we simply can't escape them—and frankly don't want to?
Listen: disi.org/the-aura-of-...
Very 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)
NEW we are hiring 2-3 Postdocs in Social & Decision Neuroscience (SDN) at Caltech. The posting is here www.hss.caltech.edu/about/job-op...
Applications are due 15 February 2026.
Our core group in SDN is RAdolphs, me, DMobbs, JO'Doherty, and ARangel. Our track record of postdoc success is strong
🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉
"Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps...
Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n
Thrilled to see this paper out, two years after starting our collaboration at @divintelligence.bsky.social
🚨Excited to share our new theoretical framework to classify and spark mechanistic inquiries into various forms of collective intelligence!
Soon to be published in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
Thanks to @divintelligence.bsky.social
Thread by Cody Moser @culturologies.co 👇🏽
n/n Overall, we show how people compromise in collaborative tasks, and how social incentives & metacognitive judgments steer decisions, using a dynamic foraging task that links real choices, shared outcomes & responsibility judgments -- relevant for understanding coordination & collective behavior!
5/n how do people evaluate each other’s actions? Here, we see a clear egocentric bias: people take more credit for wins than blame for losses. Larger differences in partners’ choices amplify this asymmetry, and higher bias predicts less compromise -- pushing partners further apart.
4/n We find that most people tend to reciprocally compromise with their partner—even it is suboptimal. Why? Because of implicit social value: people preferred partners who compromised. Our computational model helps explain how compromise emerges at the level of an individual decision-maker.
3/n to get at this, we designed a novel dyadic, turn-based foraging task where pairs had to coordinate to balance risk vs reward, and then privately share blame or credit after every joint outcome.
2/n We ask: how do people manage diverging preferences in joint tasks like foraging? How do they evaluate each other's contributions and what role do such evaluations play in shaping future actions and collective success?
🚨 Excited to end the year with a new preprint w/ Wenning Deng (not on bsky) and Dean Mobbs @fearbrain.bsky.social 🎉 🎉
"Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging" osf.io/preprints/ps...
Feedback is very welcome! Thread: 🧵 1/n
An excellent resource for data visualization!
Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review.
Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...
I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
Perfect reading for Thanksgiving break 🤓
The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search
New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS:
Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly?
(or why does it hurt to think)
never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience
My main takeaway from this one:
Dog domestication is a singular "natural experiment" in brain evolution, one that we're just starting to understand. It's a bit bonkers more neuroscientists aren't working on it.
Slide title: "network effects in scientific labor" networks mediate most scientific activities: 1. scientific training, hiring, collaboration, teaching, attention, peer review, etc. 2. networks act like a form of unequally distributed social capital a productive collaborator --> increases your productivity a prominent collaborator --> increases your prominence How much does who you work with impact your productivity and prominence?
Slide title: "model checking". Shows the results of applying our probabilistic generative from Li et al. Nature Communications (2022) for estimating individual productivity and prominence parameters from observed collaboration network data. This "nets out" the network, and estimates individual levels of activity. Left figure is joint distribution of productivity lambda and prominence theta, showing productivity is tightly concentrated around 0.42 papers/year, while prominence has a long tail, with most mid-career scientists (we studied 200,000 from 6 STEM fields) have very low prominence. Right figure shows pairwise correlation matrix of measures like number of papers, number of citations, lambda, theta, having a high-lambda coauthor, and having a high-theta coauthor. Strong correlation between your own number of papers and having a high-lambda (very productive) coauthor, etc. Good sanity checks for the model.
Slide title "gender vs. productivity & prominence" Notes decades of past work showing a "productivity gap" between men and women, in which men publish more papers and receive more citations over time. But, after "netting out" their collaboration networks, we find no gender difference at all between individual productivity and individual prominence, implying that it's difference in who men and women work with (the size and composition of their collaboration networks) that drives the observed gap in productivity, not differences at the individual level.
Slide title "how important is who you work with?" This is a wrap-up slide from the end of the talk: networks act like unequally distributed social capital in science they mediate our scientific attention, evaluation, and collaboration differences in collaboration networks can explain gendered differences in productivity & prominence early-career productivity & prominence what else? can we intervene in these networks to mitigate inequalities? funds for new collaborations, eg, after parenthood? early-career fellowships to work with elite senior coauthors?
Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week
I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital
aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...