#Iran is in blackout: no internet, no connection. We’re completely cut off, with no way to reach or hear from our loved ones.
In this silence, the mullahs are preparing to unleash yet another massacre against people who are protesting for their freedom.
it would be fascinating to explore, especially to see whether it correlates (perhaps negatively) with the cultural importance of romantic love in a community and the need to demarcate it.
Thank you so much for your interest! We did touch on this, and lip-to-lip kissing among early Christians. However, I haven’t seen any large dataset on parent–child lip-kissing. Please let me know if you come across one 😌 (but I come across historical and ethnographical reports of it)
This paper is like a souvenir of one of the most frantic and meaningful periods of my life — started during a war and travel bans and now published amid social protests in my home country.
Many thanks to @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social for her amazing warmth and support throughout this journey!
7/ ✏️🔍
Our account predicts:
- Non‑kissing cultures should still see romantic kissing as intimate, while not necessarily “romantic.”
- Children may initially see lip‑kissing as a general intimacy cue, then learn it’s specifically romantic.
6/😚
As it involves:
- Close bodily contact
- Synchrony
- Sharing saliva
- Somewhat costly (bc of pathogens)
👀 We argue this is why it keeps being rediscovered.
5/
Cultural evolution doesn’t search randomly. It tends to “settle” on practices that fit our cognitive dispositions.
Given our early emerging abstract ideas about intimacy, lip‑to‑lip kissing is an especially intuitive solution...
4/💞
Now add culture and history.
Romantic love is near‑universal, BUT how important it is varies hugely.
In societies where romantic love becomes central and high‑stakes, people need clear, intuitive ways to signal and differentiate romantic bonds from other close relationships.
3/ 💌
Across cultures, adults do this too: feeding each other, sharing cups, ritual food/drink exchange—all reliably mark intimate “communal sharing” bonds.
This suggests humans have a widely shared intuition:
**Shared bodily substances = Closer relationship.**
2/
Infants 👼 appear to have core knowledge about social relationships.
Even babies treat *saliva sharing* and very close bodily contact as special cues of close relationships.
1/ Romantic kissing 👨❤️💋👨 is common across cultures—but NOT universal.
Of note, societies with little contact seem to “reinvent” it.
We argue this is b/c kissing sits in a cultural basin of attraction carved by our early‑emerging understanding of intimacy. 🧵
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
My very personal story about how I discovered evolutionary psychology.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
Many people from my lab are presenting exciting work at SRCD!
Yay for replication! I'm thrilled that scholars I admire so much put the time and effort into replicating our work!
🚨New Paper Klaxon 🚨
Belief in Belief: Even Atheists in Secular Countries Show Intuitive Preferences Favoring Religious Belief.
Now out at PNAS
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Here's a quick 🧵 on what we did and found!👇
1/ 11
🧪
#atheism
#religion
#culture
#evolution
The world is on fire, but three post-baccs from my lab got offers to PhD programs! All women of color who are going to do amazing things! And whose research interests and amazing ideas are informed by their lived experiences as a Black woman, a Taiwanese woman, and a Mexican woman.
Conveniently published for Valentine's Day, here's a cute study about the evolution of teddy bears we did with @hsamani.bsky.social, @edgardubourg.bsky.social, @oliviermorin.bsky.social & many others 🐻
brill.com/view/journal...
New Daedalus issue on the science of caregiving. In our paper, we ask, how might infants experience caregiving? Writing this paper with Christina Steele,
@alisongopnik.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social was incredibly fun. Our paper and the other awesome pieces here:
www.amacad.org/daedalus
I do not know the organizers of this event personally, but I'm thrilled to see that there are still people in Iran determined to break through the regime's barriers and passionately connect with cutting-edge science of the mind. Kudos to all of them :)