Sebastian Olschewski

New publication @PNASNews: Frequent winners explain apparent skewness preferences in experience-based decisions pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.10… With @Mikhail_Spektor and @gael_lemens Thread(1/7)>>>

Open access paper published in Cognitive Psychology: "Compressed representations and attentional competition in numeric integration for average estimations" w/ Alice Mason from Uni Bath & @Seb_Olschewski

New short-form preprint in which we use Centaur to identify gaps in interpretable cognitive models and revise them accordingly using Qwen3 -- fully automated and without a human-in-the-loop. arxiv.org/abs/2505.17661

Completely nonsensical politicization of scientistics identifying and correcting problems in science. - Gino's research was not "promoting progressive ideas" - The problems were not found by "bloggers," but by leading researchers/faculty in the same scientific discipline.

In this article, Du & Haith show that behavior can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation, respectively nature.com/articles/s4156…

Excited to share a new Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper that I had the pleasure to be a part of. This is an interdisciplinary perspective on the dynamics of cognitive costs, namely when these costs occur and how they impact our decisions. #neuroeconomics sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This meta-analysis of 79 RCTs by Hoppen et al found that social comparison is an effective behaviour change technique for pro-environmental-, health-, performance-, and service-related behaviours. nature.com/articles/s4156…

New preprint out with an amazing 40-person team! We find that Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms incentivised human persuaders in a >1000-participant live quiz-chat in deceptive and truthful directions!

Announcing the summer school on "Cognitive Foundations of Decision-Making" to be held from June 30 to July 4, 2025, in Ghent, Belgium. For information and the application pprocedures, see rislab.net/summer-school-…

We are looking for two PhD students at our institute in Munich. Both postions are open-topic, so anything between cognitive science and machine learning is possible. More information: hcai-munich.com/PhDHCAI.pdf Feel free to share broadly!

We concluded that keeping track of the number of ordinal wins over all outcome pairs of two sequences remains an important behavioral mechanism in decisions from experience. But we are looking forward to future work to better understand how people process skewed distributions.

However, we argued that such a mechanism would be inconsistent with other experimental findings from our paper “Frequent winners explain apparent skewness preferences in experience-based decisions”.

@Mikhail_Spektor , @gael_lemens, and me engaged in an interesting debate about why people could prefer right-skewed outcome distributions in experience-based decision-making published in @PNASNews : pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

🚨Out today in PNAS @PNASNews🚨 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)? We analyze 100k estimates to find out🧵👇

Submissions for our 2025 @EcScienceAssoc European Meeting are now open! Send in your abstract by May 5 and join us in September in Brno @muni_cz esa2025.econ.muni.cz

🚨 New paper 🚨 Out in @CommsPsychol: "Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation" with Claire Lugrin and Christian Ruff We use gaze data and display manipulations in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that these manipulations can drive choices through attention 👇

Why do people act randomly when playing games? And why do their actions depend on the context? An extended variational autoencoder models the cognitive processes that govern human decisions in games: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… With Guy Aridor and Mike Woodford.

LLM agents behave unlike humans in standard experimental finance (bubble) experiments.

Excited to share the materials for our course on open LLMs for science of science research @ZakASHussain and I offered at the recent meeting of @euroscisci at @LMU_Muenchen. github.com/zak-Hussain/LL…

I have written a review article on the research within experimental economics studying the impact of intelligence on economic decision making. doi.org/10.1093/acrefo… #econtwitter