📝 Writing Wednesday! Ph.D. Candidate Michael Gaffney first-authored an article on on how children communicate their needs through crying. This research was recently published in Human Nature, and his photo taken in Utila, Honduras made the cover image! Article: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Colleagues based at UK universities: please sign and share this letter to support Gazan students coming to study in the UK, in order to request Governmental deferral of the biometric data requirement and safe evacuation.

Challenging alpha male’ norms: new study across #primates reveals that power relationships between males and females are less clear-cut than expected. An intl. team including D. Lukas @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social shows that context matters for which sex has power www.mpg.de/24986976/063...

Our new commentary on #Dyspraxia is out! We dive into misdiagnosis, lived experiences, identity, and the systemic barriers faced in an ableist world. Read more! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans.  doi.org/10.1038/s414... With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

Here's the run down of my talk at #EHBEA2025 entitled 'Analysing the Form and Function of Rituals Using Large Language Models: Fasting'. I illustrate how we can use LLMs to measure the constituent properties of rituals across ethnographic texts to test theoretical models on a large-scale.

For anyone who needs a crash course on power and resistance: www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

"Without theory, one can never understand the general underlying mechanisms that operate in many guises in different situations." Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Now published! Psychological adaptations for fitness interdependence underlie cooperation across human ecologies. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

Important research! War, forced migration, and mental health in youth

Meta-analysis of cooperation studies by Jin et al (2024): 'lower conflict of interests was associated with higher cooperation and... implementation of sanctions (i.e., reward and punishment of behaviors) and... allowing for communication most strongly enhanced cooperation.' #ehbea #culturalevolution

"We demonstrate the clinical relevance of brain connectivity in youth depression and highlight a critical role of functional hub regions, especially those localized to the default mode and dorsal and ventral attention networks in youth MDD." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

It feels like cultural evolution is going back to the idea that humans are in fact smarter than other animals (which does not seem that crazy indeed…) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My new theory paper w/ Dan Balliet accepted to Psych Review, “Fitness Interdependence Underlies Cooperation across Human Ecologies” osf.io/preprints/os...