"Instead of unifying different strands of animal behavior research, Sociobiology amounted to an individualistic effort aiming to supersede ongoing developments in the field. Wilson neither provided the theoretical cohesion nor inspired the social unity necessary for the foundation of a discipline"

What do political scientists actually mean when they use the phrase "radical right"? New-ish chapter 📚, and like the rest of this excellent volume, it's #openaccess

Friends, Claudette Colvin—the 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in March 1955 & joined the federal case against bus segregation that went to the Supreme Court — died today at age 86. But there are lots of myths and mis-impressions about her. A short corrective thread:

I've been working for ages on a comprehensive revamp of the Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on "Animal Consciousness", with new sections on non-Western perspectives, methodological challenges and evolutionary big pictures, and it's out today: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons.... Hope you find it useful!

Our new book on health and disease is now available for free for two weeks. Get it before it is gone and please share this post! #philsci

It's tempting to think of lies as aiming to deceive, so that an unconvincing lie is an unsuccessful lie, and an obvious lie is an incompetent one. This piece, co-authored with Jennifer Saul, gives a primer on the usefulness of obvious lies for authoritarian politics.

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Here is an opinionated overview in press at Philosophy Compass. Critical 4E cognitive science, as we call this emerging research program, adopts the 4E frameworks and concepts but with a critical lens: questioning its hidden assumptions and leveraging its theoretical resources for social criticism.

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true” Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness” philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

Uh… check out what ChatGPT allegedly told a man before he killed his mother and then himself. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A while ago, I posted a set of notes about the Bayesian approach to inquiry and how it can help us think about questions raised in the recent literature on zetetic epistemology. I’ve now corralled that material into something like a first draft of a book. I hope it might be of interest to others.

Testing the socio-functional model: Does precarity cause conspiracy belief? TLDR; probably not huge thx: Antipodean Misinformation and Conspiracies Club @matthewmatix.bsky.social @lingtax.bsky.social @scicomguy.bsky.social @srhastraea.bsky.social @eddieclarke.bsky.social & students osf.io/nq3y7/

First post on bluesky! Announcing a new preprint with @eiling.bsky.social : We “broke” the bouba-kiki effect. osf.io/preprints/ps...

« Butt phrenology » seems like an adequate summary of this year.

Incredible social science & data use here. The immediate story is about how the opioid epidemic (pushed by pharma in high cancer areas), resulted in major opioid death & economic hardship which - through various media/political channels - resulted in a sustained rise in support for the Republicans

Le complotisme, c'est ce que Pierre Dac appelait : "Être pour tout ce qui est contre et contre tout ce qui est pour" ; à ceci près que les complotistes se voient, comme dans un film hollywoodien, dans le rôle des "gentils" qui sont "contre", et qui triompheront fatalement des "méchants" à la fin.

The special issue *The Principle of Charity in Language, Thought, and Interpretation* is out! I'm grateful to my co-editors and to the other contributors. link.springer.com/journal/1124...

We tend to assume that rules are mostly about maintaining order, reducing prediction errors, and generally helping people cooperate. But not all rules do that--and, as Connie Chiu and I found in our most recent paper, people will buy rules in economic games of little use osf.io/preprints/ps...

In this new paper, we look at some different dimensions on which beliefs vary: - Is the belief deeply important to your identity? - Would you change your mind if you got evidence against it? - Is it best described in terms of credences (“pretty sure”), or is it more yes/no? 1/

𝗢𝗻 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀: 𝗔 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 Excellent paper discussing how considering biology is important to understand consciousness. Really enjoyed this one. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroskyence

The trap Trump now faces - the Epstein redactions will only fuel conspiracy theories even when they are innocuous. Our 2016 JEPS article: "Classified or Coverup? The Effect of Redactions on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Cultural Attractors by Dan Sperber: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.61e20c82

A significant portion of content these like-minded billionaires pump into the ether is about how George Soros, college professors, public school teachers, and journalists are supposedly colluding to brainwash you.

I was delighted to jointly win the Anne Treisman award 2025! For my paper on Bayesian polarisation, in Cognition: doi.org/10.1016/j.co... Thanks so much to @sjblakemore.bsky.social and the rest of the committee, and my co-authors @leede-wit.bsky.social and @jenskoedmadsen.bsky.social

J’ai assisté à bien trop de trucs de ce genre.

Un podcast où j’ai causé de complotisme, un sujet dont je ne parviens malheureusement pas à me désintéresser.

I’m *very* excited to announce that the special issue of The Monist that I co-edited with Paul Roth is finally out! It includes my new paper alongside a fantastic set of contributions. academic.oup.com/monist/issue... Happy to share a pre-print of my article—just ask!

1/n Out today in @jamapsychiatry.com: Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions. We find troubling variability in whether people think they should respond based on the frequency of the Sx or the frequency of being bothered by the Sx. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

This is a really interesting paper about the role of knowledge claims in rural resentment and urban-rural divides more broadly. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... cc: @svenhegewald.bsky.social @juliusk.bsky.social @twanhuijsmans.bsky.social @pauruh.bsky.social @rgarciadelhorno.bsky.social

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication is out & we (w/ Michael Brüggemann) contributed an entry on 💥 "Discursive #Polarization" 🗯️ Many thanks to the editors @alessandronai.bsky.social, Max Grömping & @dominiquewirz.bsky.social! 🛜 #OpenAccess accepted preprint: osf.io/preprints/os...

Why do humans have linguistic intuition? And why should you care? A short thread about my new paper in @cadlin.bsky.social This work has the most original insight I've ever had, a genuinely new idea about the nature of language cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca... 1/20

The @springernature.com book "The Bodily Self, Emotion, and Subjective Time: Exploring Interoception through the Contributions of A.D. (Bud) Craig" is out: 22 authors, 16 chapters. Neurobiology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroimaging, Musicology, Philosophy, ... link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Guardian: Face transplants promised hope. Patients were put through the unthinkable www.theguardian.com/science/2025... "negative data is often buried, driven by funding battles and institutional rivalry"; will this also happen with implantable BCIs?

Why aren't families having more babies? This brand new paper argues that part of the reason is because childcare is so expensive. "A 10% increase in the price of childcare leads to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate" abigaildow.com/assets/docs/...

A fascinating & damning exposé on Oliver Sacks, author of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. It turns out, by his own admission in his private journals, that much of his work was akin to “fairy tales” — based on “lies”, “falsifications”, & “fabrications”. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Grateful for the opportunity to contribute—by name—to what must be the most massive collaborative encyclopedia project of all time, next to Wikipedia. All credit goes to @annisch.bsky.social who did the heavy lifting for the overview article on Populist Attitudes. osf.io/preprints/so...

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀, 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆? @lucinauddin.bsky.social explains many of the challenges and controversies! Great discussion too. Check out the latest Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon. youtu.be/pP5swFPR0Ns

New Special Issue of #HOPOS on Paul Feyerabend. Featuring a new transcription and critical overview of Paul Feyerabend’s unpublished manuscript “On the Responsibility of Scientists” as well as eight new papers. Link to the special issue: www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hopos/20...

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Online Now: Shaping bodily self-awareness through thermosensory signals

Motivated reasoning is a well-understood phenomenon - or is it? In a new paper just published at @collabrapsychology.bsky.social we discuss three known unknowns. doi.org/10.1525/coll... Here is a 🧵

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Me when I cite myself:

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. #cdnpoli

What an interesting coincidence.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

“Where are the findings? You only provide quotes.” New article considers qualitative researchers’ experiences of methodologically incongruent peer review feedback Open Access: dx.doi.org/10.1037/qup0... Few quotes follow 🧵