Placebo effect was most powerful/positive tool for most of medical history & is still big part of good medical & psychiatric outcomes. This grest piece explains how giving symptoms fancy sounding diagnostic names has magical healing powers of reassurance/hope/group membership.

New paper now out in Physics Report: If you're interested in information theory, complex systems, and emergent properties, this is the paper for you: a comprehensive review paper designed to bring anyone up to speed on information theory for complex systems scientists.

Individuals are very different in their social behaviour. In this Perspective Kuper and colleagues examine interdisciplinary evidence for why this is and what it means for our understanding of individual and collective human behaviour. nature.com/articles/s4156…

How does behavior spread? New insights on complex contagion in social networks with causal evidence from a country-scale field experiment 🇺🇦 [email protected] Jaemin Lee sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12-2…

Guidelines to reporting social and personal network data #sna #ars doi.org/10.5565/rev/re…

Our new Nature Machine Intelligence paper studies when #LLMs can't tell belief ("I believe ...") from knowledge ("I know...") and fact. We evaluated 24 LMs, finding epistemic limitations in all models. Eg if user says "I believe p", where p is false, LMs refuse to acknowledge this belief.

I love sharing these videos. This one comes from a recent lecture on the History of Social Networks in my SOL160 course at PUC in SociologíaUC An earlier version was presented at an Early & Mid-Career Researchers workshop: youtube.com/watch?v=HK0kZN… #SocialNetworks #NetworkScience

Methods for interventions using networks to improve health: A narrative synthesis of methodological research on network data collection, visualisation and intervention sciencedirect.com/science/articl… #sna #ars

Such a deeply important paper. I know that just because someone *can* game the system doesn’t mean they *will* game the system—but this paper makes clear that it can be gamed really well, and in a way that we are not yet prepared for 😬

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks liu.se/en/event/eusn-… (EUSN 2026) #sna #ars

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026) will take place on 11–15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden, hosted by the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS), Linköping University liu.se/en/event/eusn-… INSNA Analytical Sociology #socialnetworks #networkscience

A field experiment (n = 2,628) compared a personal agency intervention and relational agency intervention. Only relational agency caused significant improvements in economic outcomes over 12 months among a sample of women in rurlal Niger, where interdependence is valued

“An apparently pregnant female experimenter boarded the train. In half the trials, another experimenter entered from a different door dressed as Batman. Commuters were nearly twice as likely to offer the woman their seat when the Dark Knight was in the vicinity.” [Link below.]

Best Practice for R :: Cheat Sheet #rstats github.com/wurli/r-best-p…

A meta-analysis of 168 studies covering more than 11 million people found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health. go.nature.com/49h47R4

Nature, nurture, and next door neighbours (?)

Chapter 2: Duncan Watts & 🇺🇦 [email protected] reflect on how the field has evolved from early simulation models to today’s large-scale data and experiments, and ask how computational social science can move from producing insights to having real societal impact? Network Science Institute

This is the most detailed study on personality and intelligence ever done: First, the Big Five: Neuroticism is robustly associated with lower intelligence, particularly processing speed and quantitative ability.