Edgar Dubourg
@edgardubourg.bsky.social
I am a cognitive scientist studying how evolved motivations shape culture.
Many studies of AI and learning ask what people can still do once AI is removed. I believe this is only half the question, and maybe not the most interesting half. edgardubourg.substack.com/p/is-ai-maki...
Is AI Making Us Stupid? We Won’t Find Out by Taking It Away
Why testing what people can do without AI tells us only half the story
edgardubourg.substack.com
Everyone seems to agree that Instagram and TikTok destroyed our attention spans. Meanwhile the biggest film in the world right now, Nolan's Odyssey, asks three hours of our time and people keep showing up (it is by now the biggest release of Nolan's career). edgardubourg.substack.com/p/attention-...
Attention Is Not Scarce, It Is Expensive
Or why you probably won’t finish this post.
edgardubourg.substack.com
New paper with @sachaltay.bsky.social! A lot of people think AI can only make science worse. We argue agentic AI can actually be a great tool to do it better!
Sacha Altay@sachaltay.bsky.social · 3mo agoAI agents are valuable epistemic tools. They let us look under the hood of scientific research, lowering the cost of verifying (and implementing) good methodological practices. With @edgardubourg.bsky.social, we propose a step-by-step method for using them. osf.io/preprints/ps...
New commentary with Nicolas Baumard in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, on Ko & Neuberg's target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... We argue for distinguishing two kinds of ecological input…
Distinguishing regulatory variables and ecological affordances: Prioritizing goals versus implementing action | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Distinguishing regulatory variables and ecological affordances: Prioritizing goals versus implementing action - Volume 49
cambridge.org
New in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ( @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social)👇 Why do people who love abstract art or imaginary worlds 🎨 also tend to get vaccinated 💉, support redistribution 💸, endorse animal rights 🐥, and try novel foods 🫐?
Really proud to have contributed to this review. It feels like a step toward validating an idea that is still underexplored: video games are a rich and largely untapped resource for cognitive and behavioral scientists.
Antoine Coutrot@antoinecoutrot.bsky.social · 5mo ago⚠️New review on video games for cognitive citizen science! "From Players to Participants: Citizen Science and Video Games to Understand Cognition" arxiv.org/abs/2604.24321
First time in Leiden, and my first academic talk at @ehbea2026.bsky.social. Grateful to @ehbea.bsky.social for the Student Travel Grant and for a conference and community that was genuinely welcoming 🧵
If evolution is to explain our occasionally seemingly strange behaviour *today*, we should be able to link it to our ultimate motivations. And that is exactly what @edgardubourg.bsky.social does for us: buff.ly/U39ndvn
My first Substack post asks a question that has followed me since I started thinking within an evolutionary framework: how do ultimate motivations connect to the everyday things we choose to do? open.substack.com/pub/edgardub...
What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear 😱 ➡️ A short blogpost on the HBES website about our recent article with Coltan Scrivner. www.hbes.com/engineering-...
Engineering Fear: Protagonist Vulnerability and the Evolutionary Design of Horror - HBES
– by Edgar Dubourg and Coltan Scrivner What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear. Ou...
hbes.com
#Parution 03/09. Histoire naturelle de la fiction par @edgardubourg.bsky.social aux éd. #HumenSciences #ScienceCQFD www.humensciences.com/livre/Histoi...
humensciences.com
L'idée de la psychologie évolutive, c'est que le cerveau humain n'est pas vierge à la naissance et vient avec tout un tas de réseaux, de mécanismes pré-installés @edgardubourg.bsky.social #ScienceCQFD
Très heureux de participer à cette émission !
La Science, CQFD@sciencecqfd.bsky.social · 9mo ago[RDV 16h !] Que recherche-t-on lorsqu'on construit une fiction ? Pourquoi en consomme-t-on ? Que connaît-on des fonctions premières de cette capacité, qui permettraient d’expliquer qu’elle ait été maintenue d’un point de vue évolutif ? avec #ValentinThouzeau et @edgardubourg.bsky.social #ScienceCQFD
Why is Pennywise (It) more terrifying than the Joker (Batman)? Why is It categorized as horror while Batman isn’t—even though Pennywise and the Joker look similar and share equally malicious intentions?
Glad to see Psychology Today feature our work on how curiosity flexibly adapts to the world around us. www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evol... www.edgardubourg.fr/_files/ugd/9...
The Ecology of Curiosity
Why are some people naturally curious while others avoid the unknown? A new study suggests it’s not just personality—it’s ecology.
psychologytoday.com
Excited to see our research highlighted in @psychscience.bsky.social Observer! With @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social , and Thomas Dheilly, we explored how people infer others’ knowledge: even from a single answer, they can estimate how much someone knows about a topic!
Unearthing the Nature of Knowing
Research reveals how people process information, how they acquire—and sometimes reject—knowledge, and how that compares to artificial intelligence systems’ abilities to do the same.
psychologicalscience.org
MEDIAS I Très belle chronique de « Histoire naturelle de la fiction» de @edgardubourg.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social paru le 03/09 aux éditions Humensciences 👉 bit.ly/4nvYP9C
We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...
Colloque inaugural du Grand programme de recherche CultureLab | PSL
Recherche, CultureLab inaugure ses travaux le 22 septembre 2025 au Campus Condorcet avec une journée consacrée aux sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles et à l’évolution culturelle. , Le Gra...
psl.eu
Merci Le Monde des Livres pour cette lecture attentive et cette belle critique de mon livre…
Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢 With Aikaterini Voudouri, @boissinesther.bsky.social & @wimdeneys.bsky.social we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments. 🔗Full paper: shorturl.at/JTeTi Quick thread below!
Today’s popular fictions can be extremely far from reality: The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Legend of Zelda, Avengers: Endgame. But has this always been the case?
I’ve long wanted to explore horror, and I did it with the very person who helped crack the paradox of horror… We looked at what makes horror scary. Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre
koenfucius@koenfucius.bsky.social · last yr.Formulaic horror! 👹💀😱 Research by @edgardubourg.bsky.social and @morbidpsych.bsky.social (giveaway handle!) defines a Protagonist Vulnerability Index, which accurately predicts genre (horror), fear in non-horror films, and fear-related physiology (heart rate); and... buff.ly/wscaJll 1/2
We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...
A great opportunity for a PhD Scolarship at the new CultureLab (Paris), at the intersection of the humanities, the computational sciences, and cultural evolution!
Imaginary worlds like Star Wars and Game of Thrones dominate global culture. Are they really a recent phenomenon, or have they always been central to storytelling? In our latest paper, we investigate the historical trajectory of imaginary worlds with new large-scale data.
Et vous pouvez tester votre profile de gamers ici 👉 www.the-deepmodel.fr 👈
xn--th-yl72a
Cognition ENS@cognitionens.bsky.social · 2y agoPUBLICATION I Pourquoi les gens aiment-ils les jeux vidéo? Certains jeux vidéo? Pourquoi ces préférences varient d'un individu à l'autre? @edgardubourg.bsky.social @valerian-chambon.bsky.social tentent de répondre à ces questions dans un article publié dans Entertainment Computing bit.ly/4hhrT1c
From Tetris to Zelda, to Elden Ring and League of Legends… our new paper with @valerian-chambon.bsky.social, published in Entertainment Comuting delves into the diversity of video games and gamers' preferences 🎮. We present a cognitive framework for understanding this diversity. ⬇️
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Jan Pfänder@janpfa.bsky.social · 2y agoOut in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social Can people tell true from false news? Yes! Our meta-analysis shows that people rate true news as more accurate than false news (d = 1.12) and were better at spotting false news than at recognizing true news (d = 0.32). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
