Jason Weeden
@jasonweeden.bsky.social
Psychologist interested in modern sex/fertility patterns (how they reflect trade-offs, how they relate to religiosity, etc.); demographics of party identification and voting.
I review some recent shifts in women’s sex/fertility patterns, and speculate on explanations. chartyarps.substack.com/p/the-rise-o...
The Rise of the Disengaged
The new low-fertility, secular, sober, queer virgins are distinct from familiar Freewheelers
chartyarps.substack.com
I try to improve on NSFG numbers by adding results from Monitoring the Future and the American Family Survey. chartyarps.substack.com/p/how-many-y...
How many young women want to have kids someday?
The number has fallen over the past decade from ~87% to ~74%
chartyarps.substack.com
I wanted to think more clearly about how delays in childbearing result in lower total fertility rates, so I built a simple model and wrote this. chartyarps.substack.com/p/are-they-h...
Are they having fewer kids or just waiting longer to have them?
How total fertility rates reflect both declines and delays in childbirth
chartyarps.substack.com
Time sleeping is up and social time is down, gender gaps are narrowing, and reading is losing to TV while TV is losing to games/computers. chartyarps.substack.com/p/three-big-...
Three big changes in how much time we spend doing ordinary things
Shifts in Americans’ time-use patterns from 2003 to 2025
chartyarps.substack.com
I use data from the World Values Survey to look at the connection between religiosity and sexual/reproductive morals both between and within countries. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
An international look at religion as Ring-Bearer support
Why I keep saying that this stuff is mainly about the modern U.S. and similar countries
open.substack.com
🔪"LLMs are merely lucid storytellers, inventing explanations on demand... The human mind is no different... Introspection, then, is an illusion... we have no inner life (beyond the flow of conscious experience) to probe" archive.ph/FyrF4
Introspection is an illusion created by the brain
<p><em>For millennia, we have assumed that self-knowledge begins with looking inward. But psychologist <strong>Nick Chater</strong> argues that this is impossible: the mind does not store beliefs and ...
iai.tv
Here's my attempt to convince @lfitouchi.bsky.social, @jbaptistandre.bsky.social, Nicolas Baumard, et al. that the self-control and cooperation-centered account neglects the core of conflicting sexual/reproductive strategies and modern religiosity: open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
What are the core real-life differences between religious and nonreligious people?
And what do those differences mean for recent evolutionary theories of morality and religion?
open.substack.com
I look at the big drop in young adult religiosity and how it relates to their lifestyles, how various moral domains relate to religiosity, and what this implies for recent evolutionary discussions (including recent perspectives from Fitouchi, Andre, and Baumard). open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
What are the core real-life differences between religious and nonreligious people?
And what do those differences mean for recent evolutionary theories of morality and religion?
open.substack.com
I use NSGF data on women’s first marriages to investigate predictors of whether the relationships are still intact down the road. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
How long will her first marriage last?
Big predictors from NSFG data: husband’s education and her premarital sex/children
open.substack.com
Reconciling the Sex Recession Debate: Detection, Measurement, and Mechanism: https://osf.io/jcdbm
A big-picture look at large-scale fertility patterns across U.S. cohorts, current trends, and drivers of individual differences. chartyarps.substack.com/p/the-basics...
The Basics of U.S. Fertility
A big-picture look at large-scale patterns across cohorts, current trends, and drivers of individual differences.
chartyarps.substack.com
This week we talk to Dan Williams about belief. Is it veridical or social or both or neither? youtu.be/vBzPtPNbcz8 www.podbean.com/ew/pb-ehzhx-... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...
Belief with Dan Williams
YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)
youtu.be
I look at how recent trends in fertility relate to shifts in education and marriage at different ages. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
Recent U.S. Fertility Trends
Age, education, marriage, and childbearing in the 21st century
open.substack.com
Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media Social platforms’ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com
I don't know who produced this or what model they used, but this is an unsettlingly good AI summary of my book. It's not perfect, but it's hard to imagine that many human undergrads could do a better job. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DBu...
The Hidden Agenda Of The Political Mind - Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban | Book Summary
YouTube video by Bamboo Books – Concise Summaries
youtube.com
🚨🚨🚨 The Cooperative Election Study's 2024 vote validation data is now available! Microdata: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... Or easy interactive analysis of the data on... vote choice: cooperativeelectionstudy.shinyapps.io/VoteTrends/ demographics of voters: cooperativeelectionstudy.shinyapps.io/votercomp/
doi.org
Thoughts on why some claim God’s authority while others deny the existence of Big Gods. chartyarps.substack.com/p/some-strat...
Some strategic functions of religious belief and unbelief
A quick sketch of a cynical take
chartyarps.substack.com
An estimate of both levels and distributions of surviving offspring over time. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
Offspring Surviving to Adulthood in the U.S. since the 1800s
An estimate of both levels and distributions of surviving offspring over time.
open.substack.com
Do you use our NPORS survey to weigh your data? Our 2025 numbers are out now. www.pewresearch.org/...
National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS)
NPORS is an annual survey of U.S. adults conducted by the Pew Research Center used to to produce benchmark estimates for several topics.
pewresearch.org
A look at both levels and distributions of fertility over time. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
U.S. Fertility Since the 1800s
A look at both levels and distributions of childbearing over time.
open.substack.com
Nicolas Baumard & Jean-Baptiste Andre’s “ecological view of culture” provides an exciting new perspective that links Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, & Cultural Evolution. Read more in their HBES blog post: www.hbes.com/reconciling-...
Reconciling Our Three Traditions: Human Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cultural Evolution - HBES
– by Nicolas Baumard & Jean-Baptiste André The evolutionary social sciences are grounded in the idea that evolutionary theory provides a unified framework to explain human behavior, including social n...
hbes.com
I discuss the most impactful frequently measured demographics driving the 2024 presidential electorate. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
Real-Life Differences between Harris and Trump Voters
A look at some of the features that drove the 2024 U.S. coalitions
open.substack.com
AP VoteCast, Cooperative Election Studies, and Edison exit polls each has a dramatically different take on what happened with young White men in 2024. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
Age, race, and gender in the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections
I combine the major available surveys (AP VoteCast, CES, Edison exit polls, and ANES)
open.substack.com
I combined the 2024 AP VoteCast and Cooperative Election Study samples to look at the role of various demographic gaps. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
The Demographics of the Two-Party Vote in 2024
Age, gender, race, education, income, religion, sexual orientation, guns, and urban/rural
open.substack.com
NEW - Does Reason-Giving Affect Political Attitudes? - cup.org/4lMuN1x "I find that reason-giving has very limited effects on the constraint, stability, or polarization of the public’s political attitudes" - Jack Blumenau #OpenAccess
Excited to share a new Pew Research Center report I led on "religious switching" in 36 countries around the world! pewrsr.ch/4hK1ucL A few key takeaways below! 👇 1/n
Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions
In many places surveyed, 20% or more of all adults have left their childhood religious group. Christianity and Buddhism have had especially large losses. Pew Research Center.
pewrsr.ch
Here's my attempt to fit CES/ANES/GSS data regarding turnout patterns onto the known popular vote in recent presidential elections. open.substack.com/pub/chartyar...
The complex changes in turnout from election to election
Modelling the big picture of how voters have shifted in recent presidential elections
open.substack.com
NEW: The third-ever Religious Landscape Study, the single largest survey done by Pew Research Center (n=36,908) Survey provides detailed information about the religious composition of the United States at the national, state and metro level. Dive in:
Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off
After years of decline, the U.S. Christian share now shows signs of leveling off. The new Religious Landscape Study explores trends in identity, beliefs and practices. Pew Research Center.
pewresearch.org
Our research on Need for Chaos was focused on how some voters wanted to watch the world burn: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... With DOGE it now seems to be official government strategy from Trump & Musk But the goal seems the same: Burning down existing structures for selfish status gain
The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors - Volume 117 Issue 4
cambridge.org
