Last month, a workshop on the Science of History met to explore a series of provocative questions: How do laws and regularities in a domain like physics differ from those in human history? How ...

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, ...

Music is a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies, and also fundamental to our human experience, a result of our biological evolution. Despite musicality’s ...

Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships ...

For more than 100 years, electric companies in the U.S. have maintained the same basic business model, carefully fine-tuned to sometimes conflicting local, state, and federal regulation. But over the ...

A new paper in PNAS shows that the idea of “taking turns” could help resolve the 1960s paradox of the plankton — and better predict how climate change will remake our ...

Using a variety of analogy puzzles, SFI researchers have shown that the reasoning abilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model fall short when faced with small changes. Recognizing the limitations of these ...

Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific ...

Applications for the third Complexity Global School (CGS) are now open. The school will be hosted at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and applicants from all countries are ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with ...

Over the past three years, SFI has hosted an annual Complexity-GAINs school — two-week-long programs organized around a theme for Ph.D. students — in different locations in ...