New in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ( @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social)👇 Why do people who love abstract art or imaginary worlds 🎨 also tend to get vaccinated 💉, support redistribution 💸, endorse animal rights 🐥, and try novel foods 🫐?

Really proud to have contributed to this review. It feels like a step toward validating an idea that is still underexplored: video games are a rich and largely untapped resource for cognitive and behavioral scientists.

First time in Leiden, and my first academic talk at @ehbea2026.bsky.social. Grateful to @ehbea.bsky.social for the Student Travel Grant and for a conference and community that was genuinely welcoming 🧵

If evolution is to explain our occasionally seemingly strange behaviour *today*, we should be able to link it to our ultimate motivations. And that is exactly what @edgardubourg.bsky.social does for us: buff.ly/U39ndvn

My first Substack post asks a question that has followed me since I started thinking within an evolutionary framework: how do ultimate motivations connect to the everyday things we choose to do? open.substack.com/pub/edgardub...

What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear 😱 ➡️ A short blogpost on the HBES website about our recent article with Coltan Scrivner. www.hbes.com/engineering-...

#Parution 03/09. Histoire naturelle de la fiction par @edgardubourg.bsky.social aux éd. #HumenSciences #ScienceCQFD www.humensciences.com/livre/Histoi...

L'idée de la psychologie évolutive, c'est que le cerveau humain n'est pas vierge à la naissance et vient avec tout un tas de réseaux, de mécanismes pré-installés @edgardubourg.bsky.social #ScienceCQFD

Très heureux de participer à cette émission !

Why is Pennywise (It) more terrifying than the Joker (Batman)? Why is It categorized as horror while Batman isn’t—even though Pennywise and the Joker look similar and share equally malicious intentions?

Glad to see Psychology Today feature our work on how curiosity flexibly adapts to the world around us. www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evol... www.edgardubourg.fr/_files/ugd/9...

Excited to see our research highlighted in @psychscience.bsky.social Observer! With @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social , and Thomas Dheilly, we explored how people infer others’ knowledge: even from a single answer, they can estimate how much someone knows about a topic!

MEDIAS I Très belle chronique de « Histoire naturelle de la fiction» de @edgardubourg.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social paru le 03/09 aux éditions Humensciences 👉 bit.ly/4nvYP9C

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...

Merci Le Monde des Livres pour cette lecture attentive et cette belle critique de mon livre…

Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢 With Aikaterini Voudouri, @boissinesther.bsky.social & @wimdeneys.bsky.social we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments. 🔗Full paper: shorturl.at/JTeTi Quick thread below!

Today’s popular fictions can be extremely far from reality: The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Legend of Zelda, Avengers: Endgame. But has this always been the case?

I’ve long wanted to explore horror, and I did it with the very person who helped crack the paradox of horror… We looked at what makes horror scary. Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre

We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...

A great opportunity for a PhD Scolarship at the new CultureLab (Paris), at the intersection of the humanities, the computational sciences, and cultural evolution!

Imaginary worlds like Star Wars and Game of Thrones dominate global culture. Are they really a recent phenomenon, or have they always been central to storytelling? In our latest paper, we investigate the historical trajectory of imaginary worlds with new large-scale data.

Et vous pouvez tester votre profile de gamers ici 👉 www.the-deepmodel.fr 👈

From Tetris to Zelda, to Elden Ring and League of Legends… our new paper with @valerian-chambon.bsky.social, published in Entertainment Comuting delves into the diversity of video games and gamers' preferences 🎮. We present a cognitive framework for understanding this diversity. ⬇️

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Timely indeed 😍🧸

In response to the fantastic article by @koumurayama.bsky.social & Hayley Jach on the importance of unpacking motivation constructs, we explain how evolutionary psychologists try to do this by studying input-output relationships in a way that aligns with adaptive function.

Super happy to have contributed to this project. We asked people to report their enjoyment while experiencing different kinds of curiosity (insight, exploration, morbid) in different kinds of media (novels, movies, video games, non fiction). Check Marius' post for the results!

Do we cooperate because of institutions, or do institutions exist because we cooperate? In this @pnas.org paper led by @jliep.bsky.social, with @lfitouchi.bsky.social & N. Baumard, we develop a mathematical model that answers this question. 👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Feeling lucky and grateful for me and my students to have welcomed researchers whose work on fiction I deeply admire and find so inspiring (@marchye.bsky.social, @mathiasclasen, @maryannefisher). Thanks to them and to my students for an incredibly insightful semester!

Can we trust a group of people to be right, and to be competent, simply because they agree on something? In a new paper in Cognition, @bdecourson.bsky.social, @hugoreasoning.bsky.social and I argue that yes, in many cases we can. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kA8Q2Hx2x... 1/

Why do we enjoy fictional stories? @edgardubourg.bsky.social et al argue their features activate psychological mechanisms that evolved long before we started telling stories, with sensitivity to certain mechanisms explaining preferences for certain story ingredients: bit.ly/3Ojwlki

New preprint about GPT's or other LLMs' application in psychology, history, anthropology. Not about whether we can or should use it… But about how to use it! We propose a step-by-step guide to use GPT as a cultural annotator for (big) cultural dataset - osf.io/zuejp

New chapter in the fantastic Routledge Handbook of fiction and belief. With Nicolas Baumard, we review a wide range of evidence coming from psychology, economics & behavioral sciences, to try to know whether fiction consumption impacts our thoughts and behaviors.

Hi Bluesky! I’m recruiting PhD students to help launch the Exploration, Learning, and Mind Lab at U of New Hampshire Psych in Fall 2024! Check out our lab website at liquinlab.github.io for more info, and feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in applying! #CogSci #DevPsych #PsychSciSky

Daniel Nettle is looking for a grad student and a postdoc to work on his fantastic THRESHOLD project, more information there www.danielnettle.org.uk/2023/10/10/t...

New paper with Mathilde Mus and Hugo Mercier on designing an acceptable and fair carbon tax: journals.plos.org/climate/arti...