Psych Science (the journal) is broader than you might think! Do you do descriptive research? Or research w/ underrepresented populations or cultural frameworks? Or research on AI/LLMs for psych? Or research testing lab findings in the real world? We have a special issue for that!

Tom Hardwicke@tomhardwicke.bsky.social · 3w ago

Send your best work to Psychological Science! Four special issue calls: 1. Descriptive Research in Psychological Science www.psychologicalscience.org/publications... 2. Advancing Psychological Science Using Large Language Models www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Why don’t free-riders fake costly signals of commitment and then enjoy the benefits of cooperation? We show that cooperators and free-riders can attach different subjective values to the same signal, making signaling worthwhile for committed members but unattractive to outsiders. shorturl.at/ognc1

If you are eager to learn whats new in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, checkout the microblogging report from our conference by @ferylbadiani.bsky.social. And huge congrats to @kundtova.bsky.social for becoming our new president!

IACESR Society@iacesr.bsky.social · 3mo ago

IACESR 2026 has officially come to a close! Our new President, Eva Kundtová Klocová, closed the conference by thanking everyone for three fantastic days. We were delighted to host you in Brno and hope you had a wonderful time. Safe travels home and please send us your feedback!

New paper out! 🎉 “Godlessness in the Land of Gods: Unravelling Atheism in a Hindu Context” We interviewed 75 Hindus across caste groups and two linguistic communities in India and found that atheism is far from uniform. 🔗: secularismandnonreligion.org/articles/10.... @aiyanakoka.bsky.social

Why do humans punish? Our new paper, with @manvir.bsky.social, is out in Psychological Science! With experiments in a small-scale society (Mentawai) & the US, we test whether punitive cognition evolved to deter wrongdoing or restore fairness. link: tinyurl.com/msrmu7cc pdf: tinyurl.com/mvprz8fb

We are looking forward to everyone coming to Brno in July! Your timely registrations will help us prepare properly!

IACESR Society@iacesr.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Registrations are still open for IACESR 2026, we encourage all to do it soon! Join us in Brno, Czech Republic for three days of talks and discussion in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. 📍 Masaryk University 📅 1–3 July 2026 🔗 iacesr.com #IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

New paper by @martinlangcz.bsky.social et al.!

Communications Psychology@commspsychol.nature.com · 4mo ago

New Perspective in the journal: Social cohesion in crises depends on how much people depend on each other and the government, the (un)equality of these dependencies, and whether people’s interests conflict or align. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

And see the beautiful illustrations by Eva!

Eva Kundtová Klocová@kundtova.bsky.social · 4mo ago

In our new paper, we aim to reconcile individual and group motivations for ritual performance and persistence through reinforcement learning. There are illustrations in the paper. I got to draw them! See Martin's post for deeper explanation and also for the link to free copies of the article!

Why do rituals persist? They are often treated either as attempts to influence uncertain outcomes or as practices that regulate group life. But these functions are usually blended together. In our new paper, we argue that reinforcement learning helps explain this blending.

The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Feryl Badiani (She/Her), LEVYNA, Masaryk University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research. Please join us in congratulating Feryl on this well-deserved recognition!

Do supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries? And is this effect stronger in "moralistic" religious traditions (eg Christianity, Hinduism)? Working with some of best & brightest in our field, that's what our new prereg aims to answer: github.com/bgpurzycki/G...

New paper— everyone is collecting intensive longitudinal data but recent review studies report that less than half of studies consider measurement/psychometrics. The paper covers a few foundational psychometric methods for ILD and provides a shiny app to apply them link.springer.com/article/10.3...

A primer on intensive longitudinal psychometrics - Behavior Research Methods

Many intensive longitudinal studies are interested in topics that are not always amenable to direct physical measurement and instead are often theorized as latent constructs (e.g., affect, emotion, mo...

link.springer.com

Can distant conflict increase religiosity? Led by R. Chvaja, we found that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was associated with increased religious engagement in nearby countries, but in different groups: mainly among the religious in Czechia, and among the non-religious in Poland. shorturl.at/euxSh

How remote conflict shapes religious engagement: the impact of Russian invasion of Ukraine on religiosity in Europe

War and its associated suffering often lead people to turn to religion. Yet, it remains unclear whether this effect is limited to those directly impacted by war or whether the mere anticipation of ...

tandfonline.com

New paper: costly signals are not reliable simply because they are costly. Intuition may help stabilize high-cost signaling, but signal reliability seems to depend on the interaction between intuition and context-sensitive deliberation. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Intuitive and deliberative processes underlying commitment signaling for cooperative assortment

Health sciences

cell.com

🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨 ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts. internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/

As the conference gets closer, here’s how to get to Brno for IACESR 2026 ✈️ Fly direct (limited routes) or travel via nearby hubs: Vienna (~2h) • Prague (~2.5–3h) • Bratislava (~1.5–2h) 📅 1–3 July 2026 More info: iacesr.com/conferences/ #IACESR2026 #TravelInfo

How does religious conflict reshape moral cognition across cultures? We're hiring a postdoc to help answer that question using computational modeling (DDM, RL) across 20 countries. www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a... #Postdoc #CognitiveScience #ComputationalModeling #MoralPsychology

People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

IACESR 2026 – 10th Biennial Meeting We’re excited to announce our keynote speakers: Will Gervais • Rebekah Richert • Quentin Atkinson • Larisa Heiphetz Solomon 📍 Brno, Czech Republic 📅 1–3 July 2026 | Masaryk University Registration open soon. Stay tuned. #IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox

A new article in Nature Medicine found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life. Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable

Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

academic.oup.com

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

This is who runs this account

Evidence for a “Breaking Bad” effect of a cancer diagnosis—>

John Holbein@johnholbein1.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Look at how being diagnosed with cancer impacts people's involvement in crime!

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

Introducing Causion: A web app for playing with DAGs | Peder M. Isager

Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager

pedermisager.org

New paper - we try to test a classic secularization theory w/ longitudinal data: is material security in early adolescence associated with later decrease in belief in God in young adulthood? tl;dr: it is, a little bit.. w/ @lnpx1thetadelta.bsky.social & R.Chvaja www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core

The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans - Volume 8

cambridge.org

We’re organizing IACESR 2026 in Brno (July 1–3) — CFP closes Feb 6. If you work on cognitive or evolutionary approaches to religion, we’d be very happy to welcome you in Brno :)

Aiyana Koka Willard@aiyanakoka.bsky.social · 8mo ago

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/

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried

If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

eiko-fried.com

Why do people endorse seemingly extraordinary beliefs such as in pseudoscience & supernatural entities? Leading approaches stress cognitive biases (like agency detection) & social dynamics (like signaling). Eli Stark-Elster & I argue that experience matters too & put fwd a framework explaining how.

Eli Stark-Elster@eselster.bsky.social · 10mo ago

In a new Review for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social -- and my first first-authored paper! -- @manvir.bsky.social and I argue that experience shapes the emergence and evolution of seemingly extraordinary beliefs. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...