Why do human societies adopt rigid moral rules? Our new paper, led by @jliep.bsky.social, proposes a new model in PNAS @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thanks to @dailyneuron.bsky.social for this thoughtful and accessible write-up of our recent paper: dailyneuron.com/rigid-moral-... You can also read our own thread: bsky.app/profile/jlie...

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

I'm super excited to have joined @ubcmath.bsky.social and @ubcmicroimmuno.bsky.social !! Please get in touch if you might be interested in graduate studies or postdoctoral research opportunities!

Have ideas for your own, independent research program in Theoretical Biology? Then come and join us as a Group Leader at the @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social in Plön, Germany!

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

This week, in celebration of the joint @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social & @hbes2026.bsky.social meetings in Rabat, Morocco, we post a mini-episode from the field. Also, the podcast turns 1-year-old today! youtu.be/4E81OTQm4Q0 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-7ddp2...

Congratulations to Elizabeth Agey, winner of the #HBES2026 Postdoctoral Investigator Award! 🎉 For her work on “Parental influence on mate choice shapes reproduction and socioeconomic resources in Nepal.” 👏

"Modern life looks strange not because it escaped our evolutionary past, but because it multiplies the means through which ancient motivations can be expressed. The surface complexity seems culturally specific. The underlying, ultimate logic is not."

Not quite going the way the Daily Mail hoped. Excellent. Feel free to join in... www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Excited to launch the website for our EASP pre-conference on Prosocial & Antisocial Behavior: Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Methods 📅 June 30 | Strasbourg ⏰ Early bird deadline: April 14 Program: sites.google.com/view/prosocial-and-antisocial/ @easp2026.bsky.social @shuxianjin.bsky.social

One thing we have to do as a society, if we are going to get through this, is make the FIFA Peace Prize actually MEAN something again 😤😤

Hey all! Been away from BSky for a while but this Friday I am giving a talk on our latest PNAS Nexus paper on repeated games! We model situations where players, instead of acting simultaneously, act in order. We study the status of well-known equilibrium strategies when simultaneity is broken.

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up! airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

I will never forgive AI for taking the em-dash away from me. I was — gratuitously — using it first!

Our new paper (brilliantly led by Marius Mercier) finds that people make near-optimal inferences when evaluating someone's competence based on sparse data:

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

We're pleased to announce the call for the 2026 Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research, for a recent PhD dissertation that significantly contributes to the field of CE. Recipients receive a $300 award, a 3-yr CES membership and CES conference registration. forms.gle/p4MqcskCs2Yz...

What a fascinating article by @olkcampbell.bsky.social covering the vast complexity of (the market for) marriage! This would definitely be rich pickings for an evolutionary psychology exploration—inspiration for David Pinsof and @dpietra.bss? buff.ly/VZQZjDd

I am amazed that Bob Trivers could slip from the world so quietly. You would think that the loss of such a brilliant and complicated man would rock the universe.

TIL xkcd has a comic mocking dysgenic fertility 😂 xkcd.com/603/

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Commentary call is out, deadline 3/04 for short proposals ! It's time to roast us. No hard feelings

Monotheism has swept the world in just a few thousand years, making it one of the most important cultural innovations in human history. In this week's New Yorker, I offer an explanation for what makes it so powerful. (It's not about belief in one god.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

How can we study human development over two thousand years? For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary. Thread 👇 🧵

🧵 1/4 Last year, Nicolas Baumard and I published a target article in EHB, where we propose that cultural phenomena emerge from feedbacks between evolved psychology and ecological legacies, the same mechanisms at work in any ecosystem: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

As we evolved from our small tribes into larger communities, the personal level trust needed to be scaled up. Enter the institutions. How do they achieve that, and what when they falter? Game theorist @jliep.bsky.social explains: buff.ly/S9QBE2j

Thanks Arthur Le Pargneux (arthurlepargneux.wixsite.com/arthurleparg...) for your talk "Contractualist moral cognition: From fair divisions to the emergence of rules via implicit agreements". A novel take on morality backed by clever experiments + elegant models 👍 📃 psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Great view of #institutions as “social technologies” that scale trust from small groups to nations by @jliep.bsky.social. Tl;dr - institutions reduce coordination problems to the task of managing small groups of "guardians". But they only work where #socialcapital is strong. tinyurl.com/4yb2vasx

🚨Recrutement au CREST @crestumr.bsky.social Ingénieur de recherche CDD 3 ans support computationnel aux sciences sociales Venez rejoindre notre cellule données appui au sciences sociales computationnelles ! Fiche de poste ▶️ nextcloud.lab.groupe-genes.fr/s/XMe4EGtRfb... Candidature < 15 avril

In poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories contend that they avoid risk out of caution. Others that they take risks (e.g. crime) out of desperation. In our new paper in BBS, we show that they are the two sides of the same coin: the desperation threshold. Peer commentary call soon!

Humans exhibit an astonishing variety of marriage systems. Sometimes monogamous, other times polygamous, occasionally we even marry ghosts. The diversity can seem to defy any general explanation. In my new piece for Works in Progress, I write about the Darwinian logic behind it. 1/

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

How-- and why-- institutions work (when they do): "Guarding the Guardians" @jliep.bsky.social @aeon.co (with @marco-giancotti.bsky.social) (Plus- Bringing Up Baby) Getting along: roughlydaily.com/2026/02/16/i...

Looking forward to work with @fierycushman.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social on the moral psychology of authority!

We are thrilled to announce that @lfitouchi.bsky.social has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship to work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University ! 👏 Huge congratulations for this incredible achievement!

Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social

New @aeon.co essay just out! On how institutions let us scale trust and cooperation - and when things start to unravel. Big thanks to editor Sam Dresser. For the more technical version, see thread & paper below👇

Demain, 12h heure française, lancement solennel de la v2 de Gallicagram ⌛

💡 Our new #preprint is available online! How do people adapt their decisions when priorities change? In our new study, we examine how the way people represent value shapes their ability to adjust in multi-goal environments. 🔗 OSF link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... It's a thread 🧵

🔺 New preprint 🔺 Why does poverty increase time discounting? With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can! A quick 🧵

On my recent paper about linguistic intuition and the nature of language thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/how-i-stoo...

"if anything people are actually maybe too stubborn... there is more room to improve trust in reliable sources than to reduce trust in unreliable sources... instead of teaching lay people to be more critical than they already are"

1/ 📢 Come study cognitive science in Paris! The Master’s program in Cognitive Science at @ENS_ULM, @psl_univ, and @EHESS_fr is now accepting applications for the next academic year. 🗓 Deadline: February 24, 2026 💻 Apply here: master-cognitive-science.ens.psl.eu/en/applicati...

This call is currently open for a Humanistica-satellite event, that might interest people in computational humanities (and not only). It is supported by CultureLab and welcomes long papers as well as lightning talks and posters.