How perfectly meaningless rituals can be used to provide administrative procedures and documents with an aura of "utmost importance"

🚨🚨JOB ALERT🚨🚨 I'm hiring a cogsci/philosophy/compneuro postdoc at @ucl.ac.uk @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH486/p... Come to London & work on frameworks for "testing" for consciousness using Bayesian belief updating & latent variable modeling. Pls share!

Postdoc opportunity at the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, for candidates with a background in social psychology, cognitive science, or social neuroscience. As a bonus, you get to work with @martinlangcz.bsky.social! www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a...

My son: Dad, after people are extinct, what animals will be on Earth? - No one knows - Not even David Attenborough?

Just in case you want to know... shepherd.com/bboy/2025/f/...

IACESR call for paper closes Feb 6th. Come join us to talk about the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion in Brno in July! iacesr.com/conferences/

** CALL FOR PAPERS ** I am co-organizing a session for the #EAA2026 conference in Athens on "Cross-cultural patterns in small-scale societies: Insights from comparative ethnology" Submit through EAA website: www.e-a-a.org/EAA2026/EAA2... and please share with others who might be interested!

New paper out! We test a simple question: Do people judge the exact same action differently when it’s framed as a ritual rather than something ordinary? Spoiler: yes! Check it out here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper published with Claire White and Matilde Hernu on the self-signaling effects of attending Pope Francis’s Funeral www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My obituary for one of my childhood (and adulthood) heroes, Jane Goodall. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

@davidwengrow.bsky.social’s talk was so packed at the Brain Bar today was so packed I literally couldn’t fit through the door - I had to pull some special favors to enter from backstage

But it gets more nuanced over time...

Vassar College is hiring a tenure track assistant professor in cognitive science. vassar.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Vassar... I'll be at #CogSci2025 - happy to chat about the position and life at Vassar.

“Could mundane, often thankless tasks — cycling, tree-planting, recycling — be reframed not as chores, but as rituals of care & connection that inspire a deeper commitment to environmental stewardship?” — @xygalatas.bsky.social

Just out in PNAS! Our new study finds that a pregame ritual created stronger emotional synchrony among football fans than the game itself. @uconnresearch.bsky.social Read: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #Science #Rituals #Emotion #Football #CollectiveBehavior

Who needs fancy R packages for graphs, when you can plot them in the sand? Many thanks to @martinlangcz.bsky.social for teaching today's class at our field school in Mauritius

Today, the UK has decided to comply with international law and hand the last British colony in Africa, the Chagos islands, back to Mauritius. On this historic occasion, we were honored to meet with the Chagossian community and share their excitement and hope for a better future.

bringing the lab into the field... @uconnresearch.bsky.social

Check out our new pre-print, reporting findings that the cost of attending Pope Francis's funeral predicts parochial altruism, supporting theories of self-signaling osf.io/preprints/os...

Very excited to see this panel on my book on #Ritual in JCSR, with contributions from an amazing group of scholars in the #Cog&EvoScienceOfReligion! journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/index

Testing wearable equipment by dancing at the Experimental Anthropology Lab. Who said science is not fun?

Our lab is featured in several parts of the latest National Geographic special issue on religion. Here, our grad student, Sevgi Demiroglu, talks about her fieldwork in Toraja, Indonesia @uconnresearch.bsky.social @uconn.bsky.social

The only humans in the British Indian Ocean Territory (which is not a country) are the personnel of a US military base. They are imposing tariffs on themselves!

I asked Chat GPT: "based on what you know about me make an image about what you think my life looks like". I think our concerns about AI taking over may have been exaggerated...

How do people band together in the face of disaster? See our latest paper in Nature Scientific Reports, led by our graduate student Sevgi Demiroglu! shorturl.at/boQ3d @uconnresearch.bsky.social

1/ 🧵 ✨ BRAND sparkling new CCE paper on how beliefs in witchcraft enforce social norms 🧙‍♀️✨ What role does witchcraft play in regulating social behavior? New research from @aiyanakoka.bsky.social and Co examines how beliefs in witchcraft and envy shape norms around social conduct in Mauritius👇

On my long commute, I listen to a lot of non-fiction. Here are some of my favorites from 2024: shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/...

My IRB asked me to add "time" under "potential risks and iInconveniences involved in the study". So, the people meant to ensure the ethical treatment of participants consider them to be so dumb that they can't understand that time passes by unless they see it spelled out on a disclaimer...

An incredible opportunity for the right person: The Santa Fe Institute is seeking applications for full-time resident faculty positions at all academic levels For me, this has been the best possible job ever. More info here: santafe.edu/about/jobs/r...

'Tis the season for this from the archive: www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/th...

In a new paper published in the journal Religions, we use cultural domain analysis to explore socioeconomic variation in motivations for ritual practice www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15...

Our paper on emotional contagion in a collective ritual is now officially out in the American Journal of Human Biology. Using wearable GPS and electrodermal activity monitors, we track the spread of emotional arousal in the context of a religious procession. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Come join us in Mauritius this summer for the Interdisciplinary Ethnography field school! anthropology.uconn.edu/2023/01/10/s...

Real

Moral psychology postdoc opportunity at the University of Toronto! Please repost, and pass on to anyone you think might be interested.

I will submit copies to the committee as soon as I locate a library that still has the funds to subscribe to journals... You will also be receiving evaluations from my colleagues as soon as they get through the 20-hour training videos required before they are allowed to send emails shorturl.at/DFyso

RIP Kristian Tylén. I had been unaware of his illness so this really took me by surprise today. A real loss to the field, to his family, and to humanity. arts.au.dk/en/news-and-...

In the spirit of the days, here’s one from the archive theconversation.com/an-anthropol...

Exactly… www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very pleased to see this review of my book #RITUAL by Denise Winn! www.hgi.org.uk/resources/de...

Hi y'all, I have this really awesome 2.5y postdoc open in my group here @aarhusuni.bsky.social, on gene-culture coevolution in the European Upper Palaeolithic. international.au.dk/about/profil... - deadline Jan 15; get in touch if you are interested.

The IRB for social sciences should move to a permit by rule approach. Researchers verify their research will adhere to certain standards. Projects subject to audit and non-compliance sanctioned. Savings = millions annually and countless hours of useless paperwork. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

What a remarkable finding! At so many levels, the things that connect us are always more interesting-and ultimately more important-than those that set us apart…

We're hiring an assistant professor at the intersection btw cognitive modeling of language / social interaction, computational ling / lang technologies. Exciting environment / great work-life balance / amazing students. international.au.dk/about/profil... Get in touch if interested!