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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme
@kristensyme.bsky.social
370 followers 870 following 22 posts
Research Fellow, University of Leicester, Psychology, Biocultural/Evolutionary Anthropology, [email protected]
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zacklabe.com
Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 10d
"After nearly 40 years, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, or ARCUS, will close September 30."

"The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States funded programs that aided Indigenous communities and tracked melting sea ice, among dozens of initiatives."
After Trump cut the National Science Foundation by 56 percent, a venerable Arctic research center closes its doors
The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States funded programs that aided Indigenous communities and tracked melting sea ice, among dozens of initiatives.
grist.org
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Reposted by Kristen Syme
wsuanthropology.bsky.social
WSU Department of Anthropology @wsuanthropology.bsky.social · 28d
📝 Writing Wednesday! Ph.D. Candidate Michael Gaffney first-authored an article on on how children communicate their needs through crying. This research was recently published in Human Nature, and his photo taken in Utila, Honduras made the cover image! Article: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Reposted by Kristen Syme
rodmunday.bsky.social
Rod Munday @rodmunday.bsky.social · Jul 31
Colleagues based at UK universities: please sign and share this letter to support Gazan students coming to study in the UK, in order to request Governmental deferral of the biometric data requirement and safe evacuation.
Open letter from UK university staff: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities
More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...
docs.google.com
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Reposted by Kristen Syme
mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social
MPI-EVA Leipzig @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social · Jul 8
Challenging alpha male’ norms: new study across #primates reveals that power relationships between males and females are less clear-cut than expected. An intl. team including D. Lukas @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social shows that context matters for which sex has power www.mpg.de/24986976/063...
Beyond the alpha male
Primate studies challenge male-dominance norms
www.mpg.de
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Jun 6
This has also happening at Leiden University (much of what is happening in the US has been foreshadowd by events in the Netherlands_
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Reposted by Kristen Syme
mamsmandrill.bsky.social
Mahmoud Elsherif @mamsmandrill.bsky.social · Jun 6
Our new commentary on #Dyspraxia is out! We dive into misdiagnosis, lived experiences, identity, and the systemic barriers faced in an ableist world. Read more! 🧵
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
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Reposted by Kristen Syme
barnaveliirina.bsky.social
Irina Barnaveli @barnaveliirina.bsky.social · May 8
Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans. 
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 19
Excellent that you've got a project in mind! We'll be submitting it for pub in the near future. Here's the template for using GPT to annotate ethnographic and other texts by Dubourg, Thouzeau, and Baumard: www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...
kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
In sum, the innovation of LLMs, in providing low cost and highly accurate annotations, has created the opportunity for human behavioral scientists to investigate the form and function of rituals and other outstanding puzzles of human behavior and culture on an unprecedented scale.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
Scrutinizing a sample of disagreements, we found that GPT provided the most accurate responses for 6 vars. For 3 vars, including gender, a 'majority rule' between the two humans and GPT provided the most accurate response. GPT overcoded 3 vars.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
Running GPT across the unresolved 1,015 texts, the human coders had only slightly higher agreement and reliability with each other compared to GPT with each human. Although Gwet's ac1 was high for all vars, Cohen's kappa was much too low on 4, indicating high agreement on 0s but low agreement on 1s.
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
We had GPT help us come to the 'correct' answers by having it provide a rationale for its response. In some cases GPT was wrong, but in other cases, it helped us identify cases that that we humans mis-coded, as these examples with religiousity demonstrate.
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
GPT performed nearly as well as humans on identifying whether the gender of the faster was a man or a woman, though it performed somewhat worse for identifying 'Both' due to greater ambiguity in e.g., both vs. unknown.
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
Measuring precision, recall, and f1, we found that GPT annotated as well or better than humans on 5 vars, tended to overcode (i.e., high recall) on 3 vars (tho it performs well on Visions and Knowledge overall), and performed poorly on 2 vars.
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
Starting with a sample of 225 texts that we came to a consensus on, we found high % agreement and inter-rater reliability between GPT 4.0 and the human annotators. We also found over 90% agreement of GPT with itself on two rounds.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
My co-author Caity Placek and I manually coded 1,240 paragraphs on ritual fasting from the HRAF and tested GPT 4.0's ability to annotate the texts and help us resolve discrepancies on 12 variables incl. gender of fasters, cognitive outcomes, and health and social outcomes.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Apr 18
Here's the run down of my talk at #EHBEA2025 entitled 'Analysing the Form and Function of Rituals Using Large Language Models: Fasting'. I illustrate how we can use LLMs to measure the constituent properties of rituals across ethnographic texts to test theoretical models on a large-scale.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Feb 16
For anyone who needs a crash course on power and resistance: www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...
James Baldwin: Letter from a Region in My Mind
From 1962: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
www.newyorker.com
kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Feb 14
"Without theory, one can never understand the general underlying mechanisms that operate in many guises in different situations." Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Dec 17
Preprint available here: osf.io/preprints/os...
OSF
osf.io
kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Dec 17
Now published! Psychological adaptations for fitness interdependence underlie cooperation across human ecologies. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Nov 29
Science is a form of activism. It is the pursuit of the truth for the benefit of society. Activism does NOT mean putting the cart before the horse and needing findings to be one way or another.
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Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Nov 21
Oh, Michael Gaffney at WSU recently collected some data from Utilla that is relevant to boredom, but it's not published yet.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Nov 21
Great question! I don't recall any specific lit on boredom, but observationally, I've observed children getting bored/frustrated on the islands if someone they're with is doing one thing, but the child wants to do something else.
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kristensyme.bsky.social
Kristen Syme @kristensyme.bsky.social · Nov 13
Important research! War, forced migration, and mental health in youth
patrickclarkin.bsky.social
Patrick Clarkin @patrickclarkin.bsky.social · Nov 13
Intro for new followers. I'm a bio anthropologist who looks at how war gets "under the skin." Our most recent article (w/ Delaney Glass & Meredith Reiches) was about menarche.

"Coming of Age in War: Early Life Adversity, Age at Menarche, and Mental Health"
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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