Causality with Tadeg Quillien YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

This week, we talk to @tadegquillien.bsky.social about causality.
youtu.be/vp5mnz4eSiw
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We are offering two 4-year PhD positions in our new SNF project "The Evolutionary Roots of Altercentrism"

Social media users experience more political hostility in less economically equal and less democratic societies - Nature Human Behaviour Drawing on survey data from 30 countries, Bor et al. find that online political hostility is higher in more unequal and less democratic societies.

New study showing that online hatred is worse in countries with higher economic and political inequality. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

By @m-b-petersen.bsky.social et al.

Plural Causes Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

Our new paper on causal judgment is now out! Led by Can Konuk, with Salvador Mascarenhas.

We study how causes that feature several variables (`A and B caused E') are represented in the human mind.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

🔍 What happens when you give middle-schoolers unrestricted access to ChatGPT for science tasks?

Findings from our new paper led by Rania Abdelghani w/ @koumurayama.bsky.social @celestekidd.bsky.social Hélène Sauzéon 🧵👇

Thrilled that my paper (w/@sarahobolt.bsky.social,@catherinedevries.bsky.social,@simonecremaschi.bsky.social) was accepted at the American Political Science Review!

We find that declining public services fuel support for the populist right — and show why the right benefits more than other parties 🧵

SCORE | Center for Open Science SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social!

Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

Zebra finches transform manipulated songs with shuffled syllables to exhibit linguistic laws - Animal Cognition Animal Cognition - Linguistic laws are increasingly used as markers of efficiency in non-human communication, but it remains unclear how rapidly these patterns can emerge. In this re-analysis of...

New paper out today! When baby zebra finches are tutored with manipulated songs with shuffled syllables, they transform them to be consistent with linguistic laws 🐥 Reanalysis of data from James and Sakata (2017) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Engine of Scientific Discovery: How New Methods and Tools Spark Major Breakthroughs Abstract. How do we spark new scientific discoveries? Why do some breakthroughs seem even accidental? And most importantly, how can we accelerate them and

⚗️🔭 How do we spark new scientific discoveries? Why do some breakthroughs seem accidental?

The new book 'The Engine of Scientific Discovery' by CPNSS Research Associate Alexander Krauss is for anyone who wants to understand how we make discoveries.

➡ Link to the book: doi.org/10.1093/oso/...

The Property in Intellectual Property: Reputation Is Harder to Share Than Ideas Intellectual property (IP) law is designed to protect the ownership of ideas and stimulate innovation, yet pervasive non-compliance suggests a deep divide between legal mandates and public moral intu...

"Unlike the ideas themselves, reputation for authorship and credit is rivalrous: audiences can allocate full credit only once, so any undue credit to a copier necessarily subtracts deserved credit from a creator and misleads observers."

The ecological approach to culture The prevailing view in the literature treats cultural dynamics as fundamentally distinct from other ecological processes—governed by a second system o…

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Last year, Nicolas Baumard and I published a target article in EHB, where we propose that cultural phenomena emerge from feedbacks between evolved psychology and ecological legacies, the same mechanisms at work in any ecosystem:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Murders in the Rue Morgue was a parody, I have found the post and the website about it!

The site linked is here
wdl.mcdaniel.edu

And it's really rather good fun, some eyebleedingly bad prose, of course

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

The effects of Facebook and Instagram political advertisements on the 2020 US election - Nature Human Behaviour To study the effects of political advertising, we conducted a field experiment with over 60,000 participants. Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds of randomly select...

Great new study of the (lack of) effects of political advertising: "Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds ... did not have a detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, turnout or political participation."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

Economists: we award Nobel Prizes for work on efficient institutions and minimizing transaction costs.
Also Economists: the review process at the American Economic Review.

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.

I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.

🧵/

sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

🚨Recrutement au CREST @crestumr.bsky.social

Ingénieur de recherche CDD 3 ans support computationnel aux sciences sociales

Venez rejoindre notre cellule données appui au sciences sociales computationnelles !

Fiche de poste ▶️ nextcloud.lab.groupe-genes.fr/s/XMe4EGtRfb...

Candidature < 15 avril

In poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories contend that they avoid risk out of caution. Others that they take risks (e.g. crime) out of desperation.

In our new paper in BBS, we show that they are the two sides of the same coin: the desperation threshold.

Peer commentary call soon!

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)!

How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science.

Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

In this new paper, @klopfenstein.bsky.social shows that how surprising an explanation is accounts for a good share of its appeal, suggesting that surprising explanations (the aliens built the pyramids!) can be popular even if people aren't really convinced they're great explanation

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.

1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'

Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Félicitations, c'est super !

Long format. Enquête sur une supercherie : le prof d’université s’est-il inventé un « Prix Nobel » ? Professeur de Lettres à l’Université Marie & Louis Pasteur de Besançon, le Montbéliardais Florent Montaclair est le lauréat 2016 de la Médaille d’or de philologie, une science qui a pour objet l’étude historique d’une langue par l’analyse critique des textes. Assimilée au Prix Nobel et à la Médaille Fields, cette récompense internationale n’a en réalité aucune existence institutionnelle. C’est un faux. La stratégie qui a été mise en place pour faire croire le contraire, et a abusé beaucoup de monde, y compris le milieu universitaire, est un singulier mélange de sophistication, d’approximation et de culot monstre.

Votre article du dimanche soir: l'invention d'un prix Nobel ou le narcissisme académique dans toute sa splendeur. Incroyable enquête de l'Est Républicain

www.estrepublicain.fr/faits-divers...

@evoroseman.bsky.social and Auerbach nail the fatal flaw in the ESS: organisms somehow adapt to completely novel situations without natural selection. It's basically Intelligent Design, imo, but with the organism as the intelligent designer instead of God 🧪 #BioAnth 1/2

New paper in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Coupling surveys of ~8% of the adult Danish population & results of 123 million covid-tests, we show that psychological feelings of coping lowered infection risk. Feelings of fear did not.

Authorities should empower people, not scare them.