Terrific essay from Mitch Brown, one of the best ambassadors our field could hope for. inquisitivemag.org/articles/fie...

👍"As anyone in my field will tell you, humans evolved to maintain bonds through cooperation and helping each other. So I view my conversations with skeptics and critics in this light and as a perfect way to highlight this fact."

One of the clearest predictors of trust in groups is visibility—knowing who contributes, who helps, and who withdraws. Hunter-gatherer cooperation relied on transparency. Digital life reverses this: everyone sees the outcomes, almost no one sees the processes.

The safest place on the internet is the r/bald subreddit. I have no idea why this came up on my Reddit, but I now follow religiously, as men support one another through the decision to go bald. It is SO positive and wholesome. Amazing to see men supporting each other about body-related concerns.

What evolutionary psychology to the rescue of the humanities looks like: "The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories"

This trend was already evident in sociocultural anthropology twenty years ago and it was one of the main reasons I felt the need to move in a different direction. unherd.com/2025/12/tear...

We just launched Boys & Men Online, a new program at the American Institute for Boys and Men studying how digital technologies shape the lives of boys and men. Led by David Sasaki, with fellows Isaac Rose-Berman and Bailey Way. Learn more: aibm.org/boys-men-onl...

"If psychological scientists succumb to the same biases as others do, it is important to consider how harm concerns and identity-based biases might be shaping the production and dissemination of knowledge about human behavior."

New adversarial collaboration…among White Americans self-report measures of racial prejudice predict behavioral discrimination (explaining ~45% of variance)…indirect/implicit prejudice measures explain ~2.5% beyond direct, self-report measures

This week, love and regret with Cari Goetz! www.podbean.com/eas/pb-mazyp... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... youtu.be/XWTV4Wj-v4s

Early Christmas present for the Buss lab Coming soon along with much more in 2026

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

Could you enjoy having sex with someone you hate? X poll of 1264 respondents. Men were much more likely than women to say that they could.

"An unexpected, but interesting finding was the role of sexism in predicting sexual harassment [H]. For women, hostile sexism [HS] strongly predicted all manifestations of H engagement/experience. In men, HS was only predictive of their H of women." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The War on Sex Differences The second excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/the-war-on...

There’s a stereotype out there that women want or need relationships more than men, and that women are more inclined to commit faster to a relationship. However, research finds that men are actually more inclined to escalate a relationship faster. www.cnbc.com/2025/10/18/n...

"the evidence sides with the civilians, making this one area where laypeople have a firmer grasp on reality than many alleged experts – and one area where academia seems to impair people’s understanding of the world rather than improving it"

Part 3 is now live 📜 Here, I discuss what we learned about infidelity from our data, and why I think CNM is a better way of having multiple partners than infidelity. Link and notable excerpts below:

"women employ qualitatively differentiated deception-detection strategies to ensure the veracity of men’s signals"

Played the role of the research nerd in this discussion of whether it's embarrassing to have a boyfriend. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Have definitely come across this reviewer: “This manuscript was not worth my time so I did not read it and recommend rejection.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Evolutionary psychologists have been asking—and answering—those questions for decades. Their job, basically, is to reverse-engineer human nature to figure out what kinds of traits helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, and how those selection pressures shaped the way our minds work today."

🚨 New publication 🚨 Out now and open access in Archives of Sexual Behavior. The Dual Pathways Hypothesis of Incel Harm: A Model of Harmful Attitudes and Beliefs Among Involuntary Celibates 🧵 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My first paper, out in PsychReview!! Along with @orbenamy.bsky.social, Nik & @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social, @realadamhunt.bsky.social & I revisit an old theoretical question using concepts from evo psychiatry and anthro: Why do mixed associations exist b/w social media & mental health? A 🧵

"feminist studies have increasingly prioritized ideological narratives over empirical inquiry... rather than serving as a neutral academic discipline, feminist studies now functions predominantly as an advocacy platform – one better suited to political settings"

Keynotes for NEEPS (Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society) conference 2026 looking 🔥😎

"For both men and women, the node with the highest strength (i.e., the most direct connections in the network) is the tactic 'deceptive self-promotion' which was significantly more connected than all other nodes except the tactics 'organize and strategize' and 'impress others.'"

Technology is radically restructuring so many elements of social life, from development and education to dating and politics. Watch what happens to dating around 2007...

"Precisely because humans possess an evolved responsiveness to the strategic use of sex for resource exchange, this mechanism can be manipulated under conditions of inequality, coercion, or trauma."

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"As expected, there is an overall tendency to ignore and/or downplay sex differences... The textbooks also revealed a tension between the standard preferences of the discipline and the growing influence of evolutionary psychology"

"To assert that women do *not* have these values and priorities would be to disregard their stated preferences."

From hazardous professions to the daily sacrifice of fatherhood, men continue to accept risk as part of serving and protecting others. @richardreeves.bsky.social examines how this enduring pattern shapes our understanding of masculinity today. Read here:

Among Gen Z adults, 15% of men and 18% of women consider themselves to be voluntarily celibate. The single most common reason reported for taking a break from sex and dating was to focus on one's self for a while. www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fa...

Why do women spend so much more on cosmetics than men? Jun-Hong Kim (2025) argues that the answer lies in male choice, paternal investment, and economic inequality. 🧵👇 www.hbes.com/paternal-inv...

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

This week, we discuss the evolved logic of shame, guilt, and other self-conscious emotions with Daniel Sznycer youtu.be/OkCBaBSvSzs?... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-xyz24...

"findings may help explain why differences...so consistent across time and cultures...humans conform well to general mammalian trend of female advantage in [life expectancy], demonstrating, at least in terms of sex differences in survival, our species is not unique" www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Participants smelled T-shirts worn by men and rated how dominant or prestigious each wearer seemed based on scent. The higher a man’s testosterone, the more dominant his scent was perceived to be. 🔗

Congrats to Menelaos Apostolou and his large team of co-authors for their article “Strategies for becoming a more desirable mate: Evidence from 14 countries” being one of PR’s 12 most-cited articles during 2024 (of those published from 2022-2024).

📢 Our new article on relationship between height preferences and endorsement of gender norms.📢 We investigated whether adherence to the 'male taller norm' varied according to gender norm attitudes (heterosexual UK-based participants). 🧵1/5 🧪 #ehbea #psychscisky link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🔥 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*.

This week, we talk to Keelah Williams about Evolutionary Psychology and the Law. youtu.be/hmpfZajB2UI podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... epthepod.podbean.com/e/keelah-wil...

A decimation of the caricature of evolutionary psychology that Red Pill Manosphere gurus appeal to. Myself and other graduate students, regularly challenge this in our publications and online (i.e., the only place we'll change any of their followers minds). datepsychology.com/rollo-tomass...

I received a critique of my work that I found unsatisfying, and in my latest substack post I use research on relationship conflict to try to figure out why. unromanticprof.substack.com/p/a-users-gu...

"Given their disciplinary expertise, we believe that evolutionary scholars are uniquely equipped to critique these speculations, which borrow from EP’s credibility to advance a depreciatory view of women, while harming the public reputation of the field at large and in academia."

Voluntary celibacy is relatively common among single adults today, with about 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men saying that they have chosen to take a break from sex for a while. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-myths-of-sex/202507/how-many-people-are-taking-a-break-from-sex

New preprint! You may have seen Netflix’s Adolescence. It quickly became their most-watched mini-series ever, even prompting roundtable discussions between writers & the Prime Minister. osf.io/preprints/ps...

"Critics charge EP with producing unfalsifiable 'just-so stories.' Yet EP explicitly employs Popper’s hypothetico-deductive method: abductive reasoning from proximate data to hypothesize evolved functions, deduction to generate novel predictions, and empirical testing to confirm or falsify them."

🧠💥 What Drives Incels to Harmful Beliefs? A new study finds two main routes: one shaped by pain from bullying and poor mental health, the other by anger, control, and extreme ideas. Feelings and beliefs mattered more than time spent online. 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #SciComm🧪 #Incels