Not quite going the way the Daily Mail hoped. Excellent. Feel free to join in... www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Excited to launch the website for our EASP pre-conference on Prosocial & Antisocial Behavior: Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Methods

📅 June 30 | Strasbourg

⏰ Early bird deadline: April 14

Program: sites.google.com/view/prosocial-and-antisocial/

@easp2026.bsky.social @shuxianjin.bsky.social

One thing we have to do as a society, if we are going to get through this, is make the FIFA Peace Prize actually MEAN something again 😤😤

Hey all! Been away from BSky for a while but this Friday I am giving a talk on our latest PNAS Nexus paper on repeated games! We model situations where players, instead of acting simultaneously, act in order. We study the status of well-known equilibrium strategies when simultaneity is broken.

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up!

airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

I will never forgive AI for taking the em-dash away from me. I was — gratuitously — using it first!

Our new paper (brilliantly led by Marius Mercier) finds that people make near-optimal inferences when evaluating someone's competence based on sparse data:

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

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s

Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

We're pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, for a recent PhD dissertation that significantly contributes to the field of CE.

Recipients receive a $300 award, a 3-yr CES membership and CES conference registration.

forms.gle/p4MqcskCs2Yz...

What a fascinating article by @olkcampbell.bsky.social covering the vast complexity of (the market for) marriage!

This would definitely be rich pickings for an evolutionary psychology exploration—inspiration for David Pinsof and @dpietra.bss?

buff.ly/VZQZjDd

I am amazed that Bob Trivers could slip from the world so quietly. You would think that the loss of such a brilliant and complicated man would rock the universe.

Idiocracy

TIL xkcd has a comic mocking dysgenic fertility 😂

xkcd.com/603/

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Commentary call is out, deadline 3/04 for short proposals ! It's time to roast us. No hard feelings

How God Got So Great What monotheism means is surprisingly hard to pin down, but there’s a reason it swept the world.

Monotheism has swept the world in just a few thousand years, making it one of the most important cultural innovations in human history.

In this week's New Yorker, I offer an explanation for what makes it so powerful. (It's not about belief in one god.)

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.

Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels:

www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a...

Deadline: May 4th, 2026

Chinese world culltural trend

How can we study human development over two thousand years?

For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary.

Thread 👇 🧵

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…

🧵 1/4
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...

As we evolved from our small tribes into larger communities, the personal level trust needed to be scaled up.

Enter the institutions. How do they achieve that, and what when they falter?

Game theorist @jliep.bsky.social explains:

buff.ly/S9QBE2j

Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍

📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Great view of #institutions as “social technologies” that scale trust from small groups to nations by @jliep.bsky.social. Tl;dr - institutions reduce coordination problems to the task of managing small groups of "guardians". But they only work where #socialcapital is strong.

tinyurl.com/4yb2vasx

🚨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!

The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

Humans exhibit an astonishing variety of marriage systems. Sometimes monogamous, other times polygamous, occasionally we even marry ghosts. The diversity can seem to defy any general explanation. In my new piece for Works in Progress, I write about the Darwinian logic behind it. 1/

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

How-- and why-- institutions work (when they do): "Guarding the Guardians" @jliep.bsky.social @aeon.co (with @marco-giancotti.bsky.social)
(Plus- Bringing Up Baby)

Getting along: roughlydaily.com/2026/02/16/i...