Missed the deadline? This just in!! Preconference submissions will remain OPEN until Monday (10/27) at 8 am ET!!! Don’t let this opportunity pass you by! @ahrako.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social #EPatSPSP2026

Do we really keep score in our friendship? See what @athenaaktipis.bsky.social and I have to say about why this isn’t always the case theconversation.com/friendships-...

More than a decade of effort went into this magnificent dataset. What an incredible public good. People need to know how hard it is to do rigorous empirical work in political science.

If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after? The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵

Happy to see this work published in Psych Review. It's an impressive and important bit of theory/modeling about how we learn about decision-making under risk. Here's a slide with the super-coarse-grained summary of our results. Read the paper for (much) more. osf.io/preprints/so...

I'm so jazzed to finally have this paper out with @tagerai.bsky.social in @pnas.org! It's probably my favorite paper I've worked on so far. What happens when punishment is incentivized? 🧵 t.co/y5DUUGTdT9

📣 New registered report in @nathumbehav.nature.com with Ivan Soraperra, @jonathanschulz.bsky.social, and Shaul Shalvi: rdcu.be/eAcMA With data from 7,978 participants in 20 countries, we find that information about negative externalities promotes prosociality, especially in guilt-prone individuals.

In a study of naturally occurring ostracism experiences: After experiencing ostracism, people initially prioritize withdrawal and prosocial coping responses. Prosocial responses increase overtime. Anti-social responses were relatively rare journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Some fun unpublished data from a talk I gave years ago on the sexual division of labor (SDOL) among the Batek of Malaysia. The Batek have been described as highly gender-egalitarian. Kirk and Karen Endicott collected the data in 1975-76, back when the Batek were fully nomadic foragers.

How do people know whom, and how much, to help? we (@jessicadayers.bsky.social @leecronk.bsky.social Daniel Balliet @jeremykoster.bsky.social & @athenaaktipis.bsky.social) tackle this question among the Mayangna of northern Nicaragua, who rely primarily on horticulture for subsistence 🧵(1/10).

New Evidence Suggests Humans May Have Been Dipping Crunchy Things Into Gooey Things Earlier Than Previously Thought theonion.com/new-evi...

🧵 Very excited (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social) to share our preprint tutorial for using our R 📦 dySEM for #dyadic data analysis with latent variables, in cross-sectional data sets. This paper has been literal years in the making, and provides three distinct tutorials. osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New article in Proc B: "Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies" Using agent-based evolutionary models, we show that reciprocity emerges more reliably in competitive environments with high exploitation risk. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Psychology & geography need one another to fulfil their mandates, but integrating them has been empirically challenging. A new perspective by Götz et al proposes a unifying Geographical–Psychological Interactionist Framework to inspire concrete & testable hypotheses. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"grandmother hypothesis holds that senior women's foraging and food sharing led to life history changes that favored mate guarding, not paternal provisioning, in the formation of nuclear family-like social units" doi.org/10.1002/evan...

New paper alert! Sex and strife in our closest ape relatives Our paper in @RSocPublishing shows that bonobos and chimpanzees overlap in their use of sex during social tension -w Jake Brooker and coauthors inc the late Frans de Waal, his last paper royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

How do individual differences in trait empathy manifest in everyday state experiences of empathy? In a new preprint @minzlicht.bsky.social and I address this question: osf.io/preprints/ps.... We find theoretically expected trait-state relationships✅, but also some surprises😲. We also find trait 1/2

5) @psycheddiego.bsky.social extended interdependence research by surveying Mayangna participants to examine how shared fate impacts their cooperation. The more positive stake & shared fate in relationships, the more people tended to cooperate. #EPatSPSP2025 #SPSP2025

Last, some highlights from the #EPatSPSP2025 datablitzes: 1) A seriously cool talk by @wnmerrell.bsky.social about how we infer clustered (patchy) resource distribution based on an area’s hierarchicalness (& vice versa). Who knew lobstering could be so socially complex?! #SPSP2025

🚨Excited that our meta-analysis is out in JPSP @APA_Journals. We synthesized 6 decades (1958-2017) of empirical evidence on social dilemmas and tested which structural features (most strongly) promote cooperation: doi.org/10.1037/pspi... 1/10

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

2/8. Let me start with a recent example. The President’s “Border Czar” was recently furious because *checks notes* people have learned too much about their rights, which kept his team from exploiting them. Think about that. Knowing your rights is considered a threat. www.yahoo.com/news/trump-b...

"Women with more support from a loving and helpful partner were at significantly lower risk for depression. Conversely, conflicting or controlling relationships elevated the risk of depression" www.hbes.com/maternal-dep... #EvPsych #HBES

🚨Research Assistant Call: Fieldwork in Amak, Nicaragua (~5/15/25 - 6/6/25)! Are you interested in cooperation in small-scale societies? I'm looking for a research assistant to help in the next cycle of data collection! 📩Interested? pls contact: [email protected]

Summarised in a blog #bioanth #ehbea #hbes 🧪

What is reciprocity? Beltran and colleagues provide a summary of 34 RECIPROCITY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS 🤯 and then conduct a survey with experts spanning biology, anth, economics, sociology and psychology "there was low agreement among scholars about what should be considered reciprocity".

How do we get people to work across community boundaries to achieve conservation goals? In a new paper in @consletters.bsky.social, we show that long-distance friends in other communities encourage people to participate in managing natural resources conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵

Nice to see my recent work on the psychological underpinnings of ingroup favouritism (expectation vs. reputation) finally published in GPIR✏️ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Why do we expect repayment for helping others sometimes (debt-based help), but at other times we help without any explicit expectation of repayment (need-based help)? We (Lee Cronk, Denise Mercado & @athenaaktipis.bsky.social) investigated this question🧵 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Starter pack for evolutionary behavioral science! I know I am missing many ppl working in this area. Please add yourself and your colleagues! go.bsky.app/Rt4Kh26

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...

Feeling a bit ingroupy these days? A little open to extreme punishments for certain crimes? A little down on sibling incest? Maybe living near family (or seeing them at the holidays) is shaping your psychology. New paper on the ecology of relatedness: psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...