𝐅𝐚𝐮𝐭-𝐢𝐥 𝐬𝐞 𝐦é𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐟é𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐬 ? / 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐖𝐞 𝐁𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐞𝐧 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬 "𝐅𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬"?

𝐍𝐨𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐪𝐮’𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐮𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐮𝐠𝐥𝐞𝐫

Think being "pro-rationality" protects against spreading political misinformation? Not so simple.

The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday, like the Polish election in 2023, is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world.

[A écouter] Le dernier épisode de @propagationspod.bsky.social Au micro de @guillaumeled.it @a-marie-sci.bsky.social décortique les ressorts psychologiques qui font que la désinformation fonctionne: non pas malgré notre intelligence, mais souvent grâce à elle. podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/p...

New post on my Substack summarizing our ambitious cross-national study of online hostility, published in @nature.com Nature Human Behavior - with @boralexander.bsky.social @m-b-petersen.bsky.social @leapradella.bsky.social

🚨 New in Nature Human Behaviour: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Many prior accounts of social media hostility focus on algorithms. With @boralexander.bsky.social, @a-marie-sci.bsky.social & @leapradella.bsky.social, we use data from 30 countries to focus on the role of societal conditions. 🧵1/7

New post by me on @mchangama.bsky.social's substack The Bedrock Principle on “The psychology of speech repression”. Thanks Jacob Mchangama! Link below. 👇

Robert Trivers, a theoretical genius and likely the Einstein of evolutionary biology, passed away. His theories of reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and self deception are among the deepest and most encompassing in the social sciences. Great post on them by @lionelpage.bsky.social

Our paper just hit 50 citations 🎯: "Political conspiracy theories as tools for mobilization and signaling", Current Opinion in Psychology, 2022, with @m-b-petersen.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Compte rendu saisissant par @mediapart.fr des nombreuses attaques racistes dont ont été la cible des candidats locaux racisés en France. youtube.com/watch?v=yAyB...

La présence de l’IA générative dans la couverture du conflit en Iran, ou la campagne des municipales françaises, réactualisent l’idée que nous serions parvenus à une époque de “post-vérité”.

Suite à l'article, j'ai eu l'occasion de présenter mon analyse (développée avec Peter Barrett) de la radicalisation politique sur France 24 ce week-end, en français et en anglais: FR: www.france24.com/fr/%C3%A9mis... www.france24.com/fr/france/20... EN: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpHH...

Article on political (de)radicalization in English on my Substack: open.substack.com/pub/antoinem...

Mort de Quentin D. à Lyon : mon nouvel article dans The Conversation sur la radicalisation politique, co-écrit avec Peter Barrett. En accès libre ci-dessous. L'un des concepts clés est celui de "l'escalier de la radicalisation" : progressif et insensible, mais pouvant aboutir à l'irréparable.

La mort d'Alex Pretti, abattu par des agents fédéraux à Minneapolis le 24 janvier dernier, était d’une barbarie inouïe pour un pays démocratique.

The belief that evolutionary psychology makes unfalsifiable hypotheses is old, but deeply misconceived: New paper by @costellowilliam @ProfDavidBuss et al. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

The whole reason why certain people criticize violations of political or academic free speech, and others want to restrict it, is because we all implicitly believe that what is “just” should be a balance between :

Principled behaviour—unconditionally obeying maxims without tradeoffs or compromise, even at personal cost—is puzzling. Singh & Hoffman explain it through •‘committed agents’ (it’s “right”), and •impersonators (strategic, to gain trustworthiness) osf.io/preprints/ps... HT @a-marie-sci.bsky.social

Claude AI is making my life SO much easier as a researcher. Searching, writing, coding, proofreading.

Philosophy papers tend to be so boring and technical. Sorry philosophers, mean no disrespect, and I have a phil masters myself. But what explains this?

🚀 Le 24 décembre de 10h à 11h, je parlerai sur France Inter de comment rendre nos discussions politiques en famille plus productives et moins conflictuelles. Ce sera lors de l'émission d'Eva Roque, "SOS Noël" (lol), avec l'humoriste Florent Peyre. www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

If (as you should) you worry about suppression of free speech, you had better understand what motivates people to seek to suppress speech in the first place. @a-marie-sci.bsky.social investigated just that and summarizes it here: buff.ly/eCavrwd

New blog post on why it's not the best idea to talk about all Rassemblement national voters as a homogenous bunch of "racists". In English and French below.

🔥Laypeople Have Difficulty Processing Efficiency When Assessing Environmental Policies New Open Access paper on people's judgments of environmental policies with @hugo_trad and @stricklandbrent at @bppjournal.bsky.social Behavioral Public Policy 🔥 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Ma discussion avec le grand Peter Barrett 🇬🇧 🇫🇷 sur la polarisation politique et comment rendre nos discussions politiques plus productives est maintenant disponible en podcast sur son Substack, "Debatology": debatology.substack.com/p/comment-pa...

"The more fundamental reason social media features a vast amount of unsober, unreflective, uninformative, and injudicious content is that it gives a platform to large numbers of shockingly unsober, unreflective, uninformed,

🔥 All political movements, left and right, engage in speech repression when it favours their interests and worldviews, or offers status-enhancement opportunities. Even those claiming to be “pro-freedom”. The default is a state of *moral hypocrisy*.

Happy ERC grants submission day to all those who are going through it 😀🫶🏻

✨ Voici les points clés des présentations : 💡 @a-marie-sci.bsky.social montre que dire “moraliser la rationalité” est associé au partage de fake news hostiles. À l’inverse, l’humilité intellectuelle protège contre ce phénomène.

Deeyah Khan just released on YouTube her magnificent documentary on the US "neonazis" (Meeting the enemy, 2017). It is one of the most moving and important documents there is out there about political hatred and how to reduce it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvt5...

The shooting of Charlie Kirk is a tragic and appalling event. To be clear: I emphatically do *not* support the socially conservative and MAGA-enthusiastic version of America he advocated for. apnews.com/live/utah-va...

English translation of my essay expressing skepticism of the notion of a "post truth" era--from a cognitive perspective. Critical comments welcome.

Why is it taboo to publicly express discriminatory or "dangerous" statements? A "common knowledge" approach. New post on substack, open access: antoinemariesci.substack.com/p/why-is-it-...

*Why is it taboo to publicly express discriminatory or "dangerous" statements? A "common knowledge" approach.* In all human societies, there exist "taboo" statements and topics in the sense that their public expression causes fear or is strongly morally disapproved of.

If jihadism is primarily a set of mentally invasive beliefs, then killing the most devoted jihadis in the Gaza strip can't be enough. The invasive beliefs will colonise future minds. To reduce the beliefs' spread, *do not* give valid reasons to Palestinians to hate Israel.

While it was primarily a left-wing thing (2015-21), canceling attempts are now dominated by the right in U.S. academia: open.substack.com/pub/heterodo...

I seem to see what I’d like to call the “jihadism-in-Gaza” fallacy in how some informed people discuss the conflict. What do you think?

New open access paper in the Journal of Computational Social Science with mathematicians Louis Abraham and Charles Arnal: "Prompt Selection Matters: Enhancing Text Annotations for Social Sciences with Large Language Models" doi.org/10.1007/s420...

Instead of spending so much energy denying the existence of stable psychological diffces between men and women, progressive activists should work to make "female" qualities and jobs be perceived as more noble & socially useful. A viable 'social construction' work.

🔥New Open access paper in @pnasnexus.org with @m-b-petersen.bsky.social 🔥 "Motivations to connect with like-minded audiences increase partisan sharing on social media" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Sam Harris, I like you, but you wonder why Israel has lost the moral ground in the eyes of most of the world with Gaza? Two hours of show and 0 mention of the 40'000 dead. Appalling ingroup bias. You've got your answer. open.spotify.com/episode/7roi...

🔥Proud to be one of 15 recipients of a two-years grant by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche @agencerecherche.bsky.social 🔬🇫🇷 It's a start-up grant given by the French state to support young international scholars in their pursuit of European ERC Starting grants, the holy grail in public research 😵‍💫

🔥New preprint on why political activists sometimes try to censor free speech🔥 “Speech repression and threat narratives in politics: social goals and cognitive foundations” osf.io/preprints/os...

I understand academics' willingness to penalize Musk, but leaving X/Twitter suppressed many smart info sources from the network, giving far right a monopoly, and likely made no difference for Musks' profit. Also, Bluesky sucks.

💡Nouvel article dans Analyse Opinion Critique dans lequel je propose une analyse assez... critique de l'idée que nous serions parvenus à une époque de "post-vérité" Open access: drive.google.com/file/d/1Xaz3... AOC: aoc.media/analyse/2025...

Currently reading History of free speech by @mchangama.bsky.social Speech repression is practiced by *all* political groups, right and left, when it favors their interests. It aims to preserve people’s commitment to moral causes, and signal devotion to political camps.

Happy to have assisted data scientists Louis Abraham and Charles Arnal on this working paper: "Prompt Selection Matters: Enhancing Text Annotations for Social Sciences with Large Language Models" arxiv.org/abs/2407.10645

🔥Ma tribune dans @lexpress.bsky.social : de Musk a l’Abbé Pierre en passant par les dictateurs africains et communistes, lorsque des figures jouissent d’un prestige moral considérable, la vigilance critique de leurs audiences tend à décliner, facilitant l’abus de pouvoir... 😤

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...