Laboratory for Social Minds at Carnegie Mellon University

The Laboratory for Social Minds is a research group at Carnegie Mellon University directed by Simon DeDeo, who holds the title of Professor in Social and Decision Sciences in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. DeDeo is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. The lab was originally founded around 2013 at Indiana University's College of Informatics and Computing, where DeDeo previously held a faculty position. When DeDeo joined CMU as an assistant professor in January 2017, the lab moved to Pittsburgh. DeDeo's academic background is unusual for a social scientist: he holds an A.B. in astrophysics from Harvard, an M.A. in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton, with postdoctoral work at the University of Tokyo and University of Chicago before transitioning to the study of human social systems. The lab's research program is broad and interdisciplinary, studying the present and past of the human species to better understand its future. Topics range from the centuries-long timescales of cultural evolution to the second-by-second emergence of social hierarchy in non-human animals, from the editors of Wikipedia to the French Revolution to the gas stations of Indiana. Recent work has focused on the cognitive science of explanation-making, the logical structure of mathematical proofs, the dynamics of political speechmaking, and the patterns of argument-making online. Of particular relevance to AI safety, the lab published a paper at AAAI 2025 titled "Undermining Mental Proof: How AI Can Make Cooperation Harder by Making Thinking Easier" (with Zachary Wojtowicz), which analyzes how large language models and other AI systems can disrupt the social mechanisms humans use to establish trust and cooperation. The lab also releases policy papers on the promises and risks of augmented cognition. Starting in January 2026, the lab is running a major three-year project called "Proofs and Reasons," funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which investigates mathematical cognition across three themes: proofs in practice (cognitive science of mathematical reasoning), transcendental structures (formal study of mathematical proof), and cyborg proofs (the use of AI in discovering and verifying mathematical proofs). The project is actively hiring postdoctoral and predoctoral fellows. Over the past decade, the lab has mentored more than 25 graduate-level researchers who went on to careers across cognitive science, economics, sociology, information sciences, biophysics, mathematics, computer science, ethology, anthropology, and theology. Lab alumni have received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, Hertz Graduate Fellowships, and Rhodes Scholarships. The lab's collaborative work appears in journals ranging from Physical Review and the Journal of the Royal Society Interface to Cognition and PLoS Computational Biology.