Sheina Lew-Levy
@sheinalew.bsky.social
Associate Professor at @durhampsych.bsky.social. I look at how culture influences children's learning, and how learning makes us human.
I have just been informed I'll be writing an Elements in the 'Psychology of Religion' series entitled 'Santa Claus and Religious Cognition'. To the best of my knowledge, it'll be the first serious, long-form treatment of the psychology of Santa in Children. www.cambridge.org/core/publica...
Psychology of Religion
Welcome to Cambridge Core
cambridge.org
Great apes reassure one another to maintain the peace Our new study shows that friendly touch before stressful events, like embracing, patting and even kissing, promotes tolerance and peace in chimpanzees and bonobos. Some BBC coverage 🙂 open-access paper below! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Great Apes kiss and cuddle to keep the peace, says study
Hugging before stressful events may be an ancient way of building trust, say scientists studying apes.
bbc.co.uk
A little example of children's peer culture in the wild: my 5-year-old son and his classmates worked together to make these (truly stunning) pieces of art. I asked to take them home & frame them. To quote Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."
"If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better." -- Anne Lamott
A recent paper by Sheina Lew-Levy & @dorsaamir.bsky.social highlights the vital role of children in human cultural evolution. @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social and I argue that the same is true in other species. Youngsters are a powerful cultural force! tinyurl.com/2v75zevc @uniexecec.bsky.social
The role of juveniles in animal culture | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
The role of juveniles in animal culture - Volume 49
tinyurl.com
The full treatment (article, commentaries, and our response) can be found here 👇🏼
41b0d2e6-435c-465c-b32a-535b7d25ad01.usrfiles.com
On a personal note, this was one of my favorite scientific experiences to date; the BBS format remains unrivaled in its ability to stimulate fruitful discussion, and we are immensely grateful to the commentators who took the time to read & respond to our work.
When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!
Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49
cambridge.org
This is cultural suicide and intellectual vandalism. In an era where humanities-illiterate tech bros have unearned god-like powers, we need historians, philosophers, ethicists, classicists more than ever.
deplorable.is
Francesca Stavrakopoulou@proffrancesca.bsky.social · last mo.I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH
Check out our 🌟new paper🌟 on observational data collection in children through adolescence Such methods can capture complexity & richness of experiences across diverse contexts, something that is missing from a lot of developmental psychology! Open-access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Lara Wood@larawood.bsky.social · 2mo agoAs part of our ESRC-funded project on age-based imitation, we have produced a methods paper reflecting on naturalistic observations of children and adolescents in diverse contexts, detailing methods, challenges and recommendations doi.org/10.1002/icd....
We conclude by proposing a @manybabies.org -esque "ManyObservations" collaboration. Please get in touch if interested!
We hope this will be useful addition to any developmental psychology researchers and/or educators wanting to understand more about the benefits and approaches within naturalistic observations.
We draw on our recent experience of a naturalistic video observation study of children and adolescents in Scotland, the Republic of Congo, and Chinese-Americans in Seattle USA involving a significant amount of local collaboration and partnership @sheinalew.bsky.social @jing-xu.bsky.social
As part of our ESRC-funded project on age-based imitation, we have produced a methods paper reflecting on naturalistic observations of children and adolescents in diverse contexts, detailing methods, challenges and recommendations doi.org/10.1002/icd....
Naturalistic Observations of Children and Adolescents in Diverse Contexts: Methods, Challenges and Recommendations
The understanding of child development benefits from varied research approaches, including those that reflect the complexity of children's experiences across diverse and real-world contexts. This art...
doi.org
'It was not a huge surprise to find myself in the Epstein files...' My investigation into the scientists bewitched by money and the dilettante superficiality of Jeffrey Epstein's need to be near clever men. newhumanist.org.uk/articles/a-t...
A twisted breed
Jeffrey Epstein attempted to gather the best minds of science around him. His interests were rooted in a perverse, eugenic fantasy
newhumanist.org.uk
🚨 In the first publication from our ESRC-funded project on age-based imitation, we asked parents their views on what and how children in four communities should learn from peers and adults. www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
Frontiers | Parental perspectives on children’s social learning in four cultures
Social learning is key to the accumulation and transmission of cultural knowledge that underpins human evolutionary success. Cultural context is critical for...
frontiersin.org
Our new commentary is out: "More than the sum of its sexes" — on embodied capital & age-structured labor in forager economies. Big thanks to Venkataraman et al. for their excellent "Man the Hunter" piece that clarifies much. Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
More than the sum of its sexes: functional constraints, embodied capital, and age-structured labor in human forager economies
sciencedirect.com
First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?
Thanks to the organisers of @ces2026.bsky.social : @anthrosarah.bsky.social , @zhgarfield.com , @matcharbonneau.bsky.social and @edseabright.bsky.social plus their student helpers for organising an amazing conference
Very proud of my PhD student Alexes Mes for her first archaeology paper where she has developed a novel Bayesian spatiotemporal model for estimating arrival times using 14C dates authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
1/ Important retraction news 👇📰 A recent article using “national IQ” data to claim that a country’s “national intelligence” causes economic growth has been retracted @rebeccasear.bsky.social was among those who raised concerns - a good example of the importance of responsibility in science 💪 🧪
Retraction Note: Beyond GDP: national intelligence quotient as a catalyst for sustainable socioeconomic welfare - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Retraction Note: Beyond GDP: national intelligence quotient as a catalyst for sustainable socioeconomic welfare
nature.com
Recently we had a paper rejected from a major journal™️. Embedded within some helpful feedback were comments on our null results from a pre-registered experiment. One reviewer was very complimentary, but rejected our paper because the findings were "weak" (1/3)
Richard McElreath 🐈⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 3mo agoThe normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.
Little update: I'm blogging again! Follow along to see what I have in store
Sequences and Consequences
Welcome to my new blog!
open.substack.com
A great PhD with a great team, highly recommend!
Jeremy Koster@jeremykoster.bsky.social · 4mo agoThere is a fully-funded PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to pursue dissertation research among the Mayangna of Nicaragua, expanding a longitudinal study of subsistence strategies and behavioral ecology. Please share the posting! www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Conference update emails for #HBES2026 and #CESRabat will be sent soon. In the meantime, updated programs are live on both conference websites: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/hbes2026 airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026 Check them out! @ces2026.bsky.social @hbes2026.bsky.social
Our paper on generalized dynamic phylogenetic models is finally out in MEE 🥳 The brainchild of @err-ring.bsky.social, GDPMs open up a vast new space for comparative studies on complex, coevolving traits, greatly aided by @scottclaessens.bsky.social's work on the accompanying R package. Check it out!
Trait coevolution and causal inference using generalized dynamic phylogenetic models
Phylogenetic comparative methods are widely used to study trait coevolution across biological and cultural domains. The most common methods are phylogenetic generalized linear (mixed) models, phyl...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
