It's alive! 🎉 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁'𝘀 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗖𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 is out -- an introduction to causal inference in practice. The first two chapters are available for free here: theissbendixen.com/dag-book/ More below 👇

RCC alum Ingela Visuri's book just released! *Autism and the Supernatural: Experiential Dimensions of Religiosity, Spirituality and Imagination* is out now from @equinoxpub.bsky.social. Congrats Ingela! equinoxonlinelibrary.com/book/59571/a...

Imagine a short book (~200 p.) introducing Bayesian statistics in the context of clinical trials and drug development. Scope would be introductory -- sort of "your first short course on Bayes". But practical enough to be applied out of the box. What would you like to see covered in such a text? 👇

Do supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries? And is this effect stronger in "moralistic" religious traditions (eg Christianity, Hinduism)? Working with some of best & brightest in our field, that's what our new prereg aims to answer: github.com/bgpurzycki/G...

"'Genius' is one of the most overused words in the language, with 'asshole' not far behind, and I have known few people who truly deserved either label. Robert deserved both."

Coming soonish!

Just published open access at Field Methods! Uncertainty and ethnographic methods! @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....

RCC’s @bgpurzycki.bsky.social makes a cameo on @templetonrelig.bsky.social’s SCORE project vid! youtu.be/73kb1mddsZY?...

"Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores" by @rcc-au.bsky.social's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social OnlineFirst up now at Field Methods journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #AnthroTools #quantethnography

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...

RCC's Lauritz Holm Petersen successfully defended his dissertation, *The Ebb and Flow of Apocalypse: A Systems Theory Approach to Religious Endtime Narratives*! Tillykke Lauritz!

Congratulations to RCC’s Jesper Sørensen on successfully defending his higher doctoral dissertation today! Skål!

RCC representing at IAHR 2025 in Krakow! @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social

Double whammy just out with RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social Longitudinal projects and causal inference! Religion and trauma: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Climate change concern and mental health: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Book symposium for Jesper Sørensen’s *Why Cultures Persist* posted online at Religion, Brain and Behavior. With commentaries from, among others, RCC’s Anders Klostergaard Petersen and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social. www.tandfonline.com/action/showA...

RCC’s @bgpurzycki.bsky.social talking about gods on @artefr.bsky.social’s show Stimmt es, dass…? www.arte.tv/de/videos/12...

Philosopher Helen De Cruz has died.

Free online for the next two weeks: @bgpurzycki.bsky.social‘s *Morality and the Gods*. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

New from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social et al.!

Job announcement 🚨: paid fieldwork opportunity with Sanguatsiniq research project! Details in thread ⬇️ Please share!

Post-doc opportunities in religious cognition don't come up too often these days, but here's a good one in the Czech Republic with @martinlangcz.bsky.social www.muni.cz/en/about-us/...

AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values. @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social @rcc-au.bsky.social

Another offering from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social!

Warm preprint from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social! Embracing uncertainty in quantitative ethnography!

No clear co-causal evidence of religion and mental health! Hot off the digital press from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Having a monk in the family is associated with lower mortality in older Tibetans: a seven-year prospective cohort study Liqiong Zhou @erhaoworld.bsky.social et al |Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Where do moralizing religions come from? Useless cognitive by-products?Cultural group selection for complex societies? Our Psych Review paper argues: neither. Let’s rethink their cognitive & evolutionary origins🧵 w/ @manvir.bsky.social @nbaumard @jbaptistandre.bsky.social doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Apply for a fellowship to join us for 2 years at Oxford Brookes Uni! Deadline is 18 March. (<7 years of active full time postdoctoral experience at the time of application)

Postdoc position available in our team! We are testing a computational model explaining the decision-making process during in normative/moral situations while incorporating the formative role of culture in this process. www.muni.cz/en/about-us/... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky #cogpsyc

Interested in examining culture, cultural models, and what people think, know, and believe? New book from RCC’s @bgpurzycki.bsky.social coming soon as part of Sage’s “Little Green Book” series! collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/eth...

From the desk of RCC's @bgpurzycki.bsky.social: "Does cultural variance lie more between or within groups? The AnthroTools R package now includes a cultural FST calculator for two or more groups." anthrotools.wordpress.com

Jana Nenadalová and RCC's Armin Geertz engage in a spirited debate about the "neuroscience of religion" out now in the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Pre-print *Morality and the Gods* from RCC's @bgpurzycki.bsky.social www.academia.edu/126919815/Mo...

In-browser app for coding qualitative data. Something to check out.

RCC’s Berniūnas, Geertz, Schjødt, Sørensen, and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social represent the “Aarhus School” in a batch of commentaries on John Teehan’s RBB target article “Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence” www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrbb20/0/0

📢 The final CCE seminar of 2024 is coming up soon with @djsmith90.bsky.social leading us into the 🎄 festive 🎄season with a presentation on *Religion and mental health: a causal Christmas carol* 🎅 📆 18th Dec 2024 - 12:45 in person start with food, 13:00 online talk start 🔓Open to all

Evolution of twinning! Cog. and evo. of religion folks take note!

ATTN: folks in Portugal!

How to link theory and data in cultural evolution (and beyond)? We propose a computational workflow that starts from generative models of empirical phenomena and logically connects statistical estimates to both theory and real-world explanatory goals. Out now in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Informal survey on the global ubiquity of using monsters to scare naughty children. thetoyzone.com/nightmare-fu...

New blog post I cobbled together for the Bristol Reproducibility Network Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/09/23/e...

RCC is happy to welcome @djsmith90.bsky.social to Aarhus! We're all looking forward to working with Dan over the next few years and excited to have him here!

We all know that – alongside global warming, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and other evils – selection bias is one of the largest threats to humanity* But how bad exactly is selection bias? This is what we aimed to explore in our recent paper: doi.org/10.1080/2153... *Perhaps a slight exaggeration…

AnthroTools for R now has a triad test builder and analysis function. More on the way! anthrotools.wordpress.com #cognitiveanthropology #likertscalesareboring

"The baboon as a statistician: Can non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Minds of Gods out in PB form Aug-22! Cracking good edited volume if we may say so ourselves!

First RCC meet of the academic year with Dr. Renato Matoso from PUC-RIO presenting on the religious landscape of Brazil

Here's a short blog post I wrote on 'Using Synthetic Datasets to Promote Research Reproducibility and Transparency' for the Bristol Reprpducibility Network openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/05/10/u... TL;DR: Share your data! (But if you can't, share synthetic data) 😀

RCC alum Theiss Bendixen et al. root out the pressures that led to cephalopod brain size in this pre-print: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We (w/ Josh Jackson) are very excited to announce the Special Issue “Historical Psychology” to be published at CRESP. Send your papers our way! Deadline: 9/1/24