New paper— everyone is collecting intensive longitudinal data but recent review studies report that less than half of studies consider measurement/psychometrics. The paper covers a few foundational psychometric methods for ILD and provides a shiny app to apply them
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
We think that while in Poland, religiosity is quite high and more accessible even to the non-religious, becoming religious in Czechia is more challenging.
These differences might bring important nuance to our understanding of how adversity affects religiosity.
Can distant conflict increase religiosity?
Led by R. Chvaja, we found that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was associated with increased religious engagement in nearby countries, but in different groups: mainly among the religious in Czechia, and among the non-religious in Poland.
shorturl.at/euxSh
New paper: costly signals are not reliable simply because they are costly. Intuition may help stabilize high-cost signaling, but signal reliability seems to depend on the interaction between intuition and context-sensitive deliberation.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨
ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts.
internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/
As the conference gets closer, here’s how to get to Brno for IACESR 2026 ✈️
Fly direct (limited routes) or travel via nearby hubs:
Vienna (~2h) • Prague (~2.5–3h) • Bratislava (~1.5–2h)
📅 1–3 July 2026
More info: iacesr.com/conferences/
#IACESR2026 #TravelInfo
How does religious conflict reshape moral cognition across cultures?
We're hiring a postdoc to help answer that question using computational modeling (DDM, RL) across 20 countries.
www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a...
#Postdoc #CognitiveScience #ComputationalModeling #MoralPsychology
People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/
IACESR 2026 – 10th Biennial Meeting
We’re excited to announce our keynote speakers:
Will Gervais • Rebekah Richert • Quentin Atkinson • Larisa Heiphetz Solomon
📍 Brno, Czech Republic
📅 1–3 July 2026 | Masaryk University
Registration open soon. Stay tuned.
#IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion
Coral background with faint heart illustrations. A glossy male Blackbird with a bright yellow bill faces left. Large title reads: “Birds as bad exes*” Smaller text reads: “*Yes, you read that right.”
Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox
A new article in Nature Medicine found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life.
Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise.
www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...
📢 New Paper 🚨
Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.
In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.
bit.ly/4kvLOwA
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty — across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
This is who runs this account
Evidence for a “Breaking Bad” effect of a cancer diagnosis—>
New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....
New paper - we try to test a classic secularization theory w/ longitudinal data: is material security in early adolescence associated with later decrease in belief in God in young adulthood?
tl;dr: it is, a little bit..
w/ @lnpx1thetadelta.bsky.social & R.Chvaja
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
We’re organizing IACESR 2026 in Brno (July 1–3) — CFP closes Feb 6.
If you work on cognitive or evolutionary approaches to religion, we’d be very happy to welcome you in Brno :)
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.
If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.
eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
He once told me he is usually cited as "(but see Szamado et al.)" after Zahavi citation and that's the extent of engagement with his work for most people🤷
Why do people endorse seemingly extraordinary beliefs such as in pseudoscience & supernatural entities?
Leading approaches stress cognitive biases (like agency detection) & social dynamics (like signaling). Eli Stark-Elster & I argue that experience matters too & put fwd a framework explaining how.
1/ 🧵 New PNAS paper by CCE’s @michealdebarra.bsky.social @aiyanakoka.bsky.social with Angel V Jiménez and Nachita Rosun🎉
📄 Why do people turn to religious or supernatural cures?
🧪🏺
#evolpsy #evolanth #evolutionarybehaviouralsciences #culturalevolution
Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.
All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏
A great opportunity for ECRs studying ritual!
New pre-print analyzing 25,000 Christian sermon transcripts across the USA. Churches account for most systematic variance in sermon content, geographic region accounts for none. We identify niches in sermon content that may guide religious competition in USA.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
In our new paper, we show why religious signals can serve as reliable markers of commitment: insiders perceive both cooperative and supernatural benefits in participation, but outsiders—who don’t share those supernatural expectations—see no comparable gains, making the signal not worhtwile
If you're a data scientist interested in a full-time or part-time role working with developmental psychologists on cross-cultural data from parents and children, check out this position with the Developing Belief Network. Application review begins October 15, 2025. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Research poster which says: "What does your favourite literary genre say about you? Help us find out! This 10-15 minute survey for an Oxford Brookes University research project asks questions about books you like to read/listen to, as well as some of your interests, worries & coping styles. https://tinyurl.com/Brookesfictionsurvey" on a background image of books.
We're looking for participants for a 10-15 minute survey asking about your favourite fiction genre, interests, worries & coping styles.
brookeshls.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
We're trying to better understand how engagement with fiction relates to how you engage with the world - let us know!
PsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work!
Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :)
#PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky
