Psychology talks and events

All known languages are made up of statistically coherent sequences – words – whose frequency distribution follows a power law known as a Zipfian distribution. Despite the ubiquity of these features across languages their origins are poorly understood. In this talk, I will argue that they arise because they facilitate learning and therefore emerge through the process of cultural transmission of language. I will present a set of results on the learnability sources and consequences of such distributions in human language, looking at infants, children, and adults. I will then summarise results from an iterated learning study in which non-linguistic sequences evolve as they are transmitted from generation to generation of participants. We draw on insights from infant speech segmentation to develop analytic pipelines for analysing the sequences and observe the emergence of Zipf’s law over generations. This work makes a prediction that we should find Zipfian distribution of statistically coherent sequences wherever systems culturally evolve, including in other species. In the second part of the talk I will turn to the culturally evolving song of humpback whales and apply the same analytic technique to 8 years of whale recordings. Together with Ellen Garland and Simon Kirby, we show, for the first time in another species, that these characteristic statistical properties are indeed present in whale song. By doing so, we demonstrate a deep commonality between two species separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but united by both having culture. Throughout, I will highlight open questions at the intersection of developmental psychology, language evolution, and comparative cognition, and point to ways in which cross-species and cross-method collaborations could promote our understanding of the origin of complex communication.

Host: Prof Nicky Clayton

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

• Speaker: Inbal Arnon, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, & the University of Edinburgh
• Friday 05 June 2026, 16:30-18:00
• Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
• Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.

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All known languages are made up of statistically coherent sequences – words – whose frequency distribution follows a power law known as a Zipfian distribution. Despite the ubiquity of these features across languages their origins are poorly understood. In this talk, I will argue that they arise because they facilitate learning and therefore emerge through the process of cultural transmission of language. I will present a set of results on the learnability sources and consequences of such distributions in human language, looking at infants, children, and adults. I will then summarise results from an iterated learning study in which non-linguistic sequences evolve as they are transmitted from generation to generation of participants. We draw on insights from infant speech segmentation to develop analytic pipelines for analysing the sequences and observe the emergence of Zipf’s law over generations. This work makes a prediction that we should find Zipfian distribution of statistically coherent sequences wherever systems culturally evolve, including in other species. In the second part of the talk I will turn to the culturally evolving song of humpback whales and apply the same analytic technique to 8 years of whale recordings. Together with Ellen Garland and Simon Kirby, we show, for the first time in another species, that these characteristic statistical properties are indeed present in whale song. By doing so, we demonstrate a deep commonality between two species separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but united by both having culture. Throughout, I will highlight open questions at the intersection of developmental psychology, language evolution, and comparative cognition, and point to ways in which cross-species and cross-method collaborations could promote our understanding of the origin of complex communication.

Host: Prof Nicky Clayton

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

• Speaker: Inbal Arnon, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, & the University of Edinburgh
• Friday 05 June 2026, 16:30-18:00
• Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
• Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

All known languages are made up of statistically coherent sequences – words – whose frequency distribution follows a power law known as a Zipfian distribution. Despite the ubiquity of these features across languages their origins are poorly understood. In this talk, I will argue that they arise because they facilitate learning and therefore emerge through the process of cultural transmission of language. I will present a set of results on the learnability sources and consequences of such distributions in human language, looking at infants, children, and adults. I will then summarise results from an iterated learning study in which non-linguistic sequences evolve as they are transmitted from generation to generation of participants. We draw on insights from infant speech segmentation to develop analytic pipelines for analysing the sequences and observe the emergence of Zipf’s law over generations. This work makes a prediction that we should find Zipfian distribution of statistically coherent sequences wherever systems culturally evolve, including in other species. In the second part of the talk I will turn to the culturally evolving song of humpback whales and apply the same analytic technique to 8 years of whale recordings. Together with Ellen Garland and Simon Kirby, we show, for the first time in another species, that these characteristic statistical properties are indeed present in whale song. By doing so, we demonstrate a deep commonality between two species separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but united by both having culture. Throughout, I will highlight open questions at the intersection of developmental psychology, language evolution, and comparative cognition, and point to ways in which cross-species and cross-method collaborations could promote our understanding of the origin of complex communication.

Host: Prof Nicky Clayton

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

• Speaker: Inbal Arnon, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, & the University of Edinburgh
• Friday 05 June 2026, 16:30-18:00
• Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
• Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.

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In this talk, I present two complementary lines of work that together illuminate how information spreads across platforms and is evaluated through human–AI interaction. First, drawing on over 10 million news-link posts shared across seven major platforms including mainstream, alternative, and decentralized systems, I show that relationships between political orientation, engagement, and news quality are highly platform-specific rather than universal. While political engagement follows an “echo-platform” pattern that depends on a platform’s dominant ideology, the tendency for lower-quality news to receive higher per-post engagement is strikingly consistent across platforms, even in the absence of ranking algorithms, pointing to user preferences rather than algorithmic bias. Second, I turn to the rapidly growing role of large language models embedded in social media, analyzing nearly 1.7 million real-world fact-checking requests to AI systems on X. I show that human–AI fact-checking is already operating at scale, exhibits partisan asymmetries in both usage and trust, and produces belief updates comparable to professional fact-checking, while also becoming entangled with polarization and model identity. Together, these findings highlight the need to study social media as a multi-platform ecosystem, where both information exposure and judgment emerge from interactions among users, platforms, and increasingly, AI systems themselves.

Host: Dr Jon Roozenbeek

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

• Speaker: Mohsen Mosleh, University of Oxford
• Friday 15 May 2026, 12:00-13:30
• Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
• Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.

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Neighbourhoods are often treated as key determinants of mental health, yet they are ‘thorny matters’: dynamic, contradictory spaces where safety and exclusion coexist. This research centres the lived experiences of people with severe mental illness in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territory to examine how neighbourhood conditions are negotiated in practice. While existing literature links socioeconomic deprivation, inequality, and weak social cohesion to poor mental health, less attention has been paid to how structural and interpersonal violence, alongside perceptions of safety, shape inclusion and exclusion. Findings show that participants experienced neighbourhoods as spaces of both continuity and disruption. To manage stigma and maintain safety, many adopted hyper-local lives, relying on immediate kinship networks. These networks could be protective, offering familiarity and shielding, but were equally fragile: gossip, mistrust, and reputational concerns often undermined support. Safety was further destabilised by the broader political context. Israeli military incursions, arrests, and ongoing violence were repeatedly identified as triggers of distress and as forces that constrained mobility and social engagement. Despite these constraints, neighbourhoods also held potential for inclusion. When mental illness was understood and acknowledged, participants reported greater empathy, acceptance, and practical support. These findings highlight neighbourhoods as contested social ecologies, where violence, care, stigma, and belonging intersect, and where mental health is shaped through the ongoing negotiation of these ‘thorny’ conditions.

• Speaker: Professor Hanna Kienzler, King's College London
• Thursday 07 May 2026, 12:30-13:30
• Venue: Online via zoom.
• Series: Department of Psychiatry & CPFT Thursday Lunchtime Seminar Series; organiser: Oliver Knight.

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