New in press! RCCster @djsmith90.bsky.social et al. on religiosity, prosocial values, and mental health in RBB! www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

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...

"Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores" by @rcc-au.bsky.social's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social OnlineFirst up now at Field Methods journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #AnthroTools #quantethnography

Double whammy just out with RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social Longitudinal projects and causal inference! Religion and trauma: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Climate change concern and mental health: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Does concern regarding climate change impact subsequent mental health? A longitudinal analysis using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) | Royal Society Open Science

Climate change is having a substantial—and increasingly severe—impact on our planet, affecting people’s health, security and livelihoods. As a consequence, the concept of ‘climate anxiety’ has recentl...

doi.org

I am devastated because our cat Trasno is critically ill and needs urgent treatment to survive, but it’s financially overwhelming. If we’ve ever made you smile or feel supported, please consider sharing or contributing: gofundme.com/f/help-save-... Thank you from the heart, Alba

Donate to Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed, organized by Javier Ortiz De Guinea

Help save Trasno: Urgent Treatment needed for our cat’s life… Javier Ortiz De Guinea needs your support for Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed

gofundme.com

The world may be a burning shit-storm, but we're trying to do our little bit to make science slightly better - Our new Registered Report on climate concern and mental health was just recommended/accepted at @pci-regreports.bsky.social doi.org/10.24072/pci...

📣 New paper by myself @djsmith90.bsky.social and colleagues published today in @royalsociety.org Proc B 📣 Grandmothers are often seen as key carers, but this isn’t always the case. We explore why in Agta forgers reflecting on the implications of demography for evolution of grandmothering 👵🌍

Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Grandmothers are often presented as key carers due to low costs and high inclusive fitness returns. Empirically, however, grandmothers are not consistently important. Understanding the factors that pr...

royalsocietypublishing.org

Abbey Page@abbeyepage.bsky.social · 2y ago

1/ 🧵 New preprint out today 🤩 With @djsmith90.bsky.social and co we have done deep-dive into grandmothering in the Agta to unpick the role of demography in shaping the role of grandmothers in direct childcare 👇🧪🏺 #Grandmothering #demography #BioAnth #EvPsych

AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values. @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social @rcc-au.bsky.social

Can religious beliefs shape peoples' attitudes and behaviours regarding climate change? We explored this using data from a large-scale UK cohort study (ALSPAC) In short: Perhaps, but it's complicated. Answer depends on generation, religiosity measure and climate question doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Associations between religiosity and climate change beliefs and behaviours in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

Individual actions are crucial to mitigating the impact of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the factors shaping individuals’ climate beliefs and behaviours is therefore essential to help en...

doi.org

Are you into free-list methods and want to incorporate uncertainty into your group-level estimates (eg Smith's S)? Of course you do! Then @bgpurzycki.bsky.social and I have a new preprint for your delectation! doi.org/10.31219/osf...

No clear co-causal evidence of religion and mental health! Hot off the digital press from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New blog post! Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly. So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost. www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...

Reviewer notes: Avoid any ambiguity about analysis aims

For any central statistical analysis that you report in your manuscript, it should be absolutely clear for readers why the analysis is being conducted in the first place – that is, the analysis goal s...

the100.ci

1/ 🧵 New preprint out today 🤩 With @djsmith90.bsky.social and co we have done deep-dive into grandmothering in the Agta to unpick the role of demography in shaping the role of grandmothers in direct childcare 👇🧪🏺 #Grandmothering #demography #BioAnth #EvPsych

📢 The final CCE seminar of 2024 is coming up soon with @djsmith90.bsky.social leading us into the 🎄 festive 🎄season with a presentation on *Religion and mental health: a causal Christmas carol* 🎅 📆 18th Dec 2024 - 12:45 in person start with food, 13:00 online talk start 🔓Open to all

Did not expect my first inclusion in a starter pack to be "people named Dan Smith with PhDs"! 😅 Still, at least you now know where to find us!

Dan Smith@dlsmith.dev · 2y ago

Everybody should have a few Dan Smith, PhDs in their feed.

I found @djsmith90.bsky.social's figure about ethical publishing so helpful for students I added it to my guide to academic reading/writing/publishing (osf.io/p37zj)

Pat Savage@patrickesavage.bsky.social · 2y ago

Excellent blog post. I particularly appreciate this take-home figure.

New blog post I cobbled together for the Bristol Reproducibility Network Ethical Academic Publishing: How to Make Academic Publishing Fairer, More Open and Less Wasteful openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/09/23/e...

Tak! Excited to start working with all the wonderful @rcc-au.bsky.social folk in Aarhus too! 🙂

Aarhus University's Religion, Cognition, and Culture Unit@rcc-au.bsky.social · 2y ago

RCC is happy to welcome @djsmith90.bsky.social to Aarhus! We're all looking forward to working with Dan over the next few years and excited to have him here!

We all know that – alongside global warming, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and other evils – selection bias is one of the largest threats to humanity* But how bad exactly is selection bias? This is what we aimed to explore in our recent paper: doi.org/10.1080/2153... *Perhaps a slight exaggeration…

📢📢📢💫 CCE's seminar series is kicking off in November with some amazing speakers lined up 💫📢📢📢 These are 🔓 open to all - in person and online - joining information shared closer to the date 📅 ⏲️ Talks are scheduled between 12:30 - 14:00 @Bruneluni

Interested in causality, DAGs and human evolution? If so, then why not join the Evolutionary Human Science journal webinar on 'Causal Inference from Evolutionary Human Sciences'? Join us October 3rd 2PM BST | 3PM CEST More info here: cambridge-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

UPCOMING WEBINAR: Causal Inference from Evolutionary Human Sciences Join us October 3rd 2PM BST | 3PM CEST Register Now

In recent years, researchers have made groundbreaking advances in methods for drawing strong causal inferences with observational data. These advances have also revealed that some mechanisms, with so...

cambridge-org.zoom.us

New paper out! "Ten simple rules for scientific code review" journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol..., in which I detailed how to use *code review* in academic research in a didactic, effective, and enjoyable manner.

New blog post! If you're a substantive researcher, you mainly do statistics to answer substantive questions. So let's stop putting the statistical model first. www.the100.ci/2024/08/27/l...

Let’s do statistics the other way around

Summer in Berlin – the perfect time and place to explore the city, take a walk in the Görli, go skinny dipping in the Spree, attend an overcrowded, overheated conference symposium on cross-lagged pane...

the100.ci

Researchers should stop paying to publish their papers. Tom Morgan and I wrote a short piece about it. (1) osf.io/preprints/os...

Job alert! 9m fixed-term teaching role (cover for a colleague) in Human Behavioural Ecology within the Biological Anthropology team at UCL Anthropology: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... Teaching focused role but research time is included as the role spans over the summer when there's no teaching 🙂

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ucl.ac.uk

Recently took part in Carbon Literacy training & my action to try and reduce carbon emissions was to share recipes encouraging plant-based foods (as lower impact vs meat/dairy). Thought I'd share here in case of interest Gnocchi w/ tomato sauce - Enjoy! 😋 danmajor-smith.netlify.app/2024/05/20/c...

Here's a short blog post I wrote on 'Using Synthetic Datasets to Promote Research Reproducibility and Transparency' for the Bristol Reprpducibility Network openresearchbristol.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/05/10/u... TL;DR: Share your data! (But if you can't, share synthetic data) 😀

Wiley closing 19 journals and retracting ELEVEN THOUSAND academic publications for being fake archive.ph/ouZUd (Wall Street Journal)

JAMA introduces a new framework for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Including a call for adopting explicit causal language. This is a key moment in the embrace of contemporary causal inference methods within health science! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... #EpiSky #CausalSky

Causal Inference and Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals

This study examines drawing causal inferences about the effects of interventions from observational studies in medical journals.

jamanetwork.com

Gave a talk on 'Ethical Academic Publishing' earlier, so thought I'd share the slides in case of interest to anyone: osf.io/urpx5 Basically, the system is f**ked, so we need to publish more ethically (e.g. support Diamond OA & not-for-profit journals) This slide is a summary of my current thinking