My son: Dad, after people are extinct, what animals will be on Earth?
- No one knows
- Not even David Attenborough?
03.03.2026 01:07
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My son: Dad, after people are extinct, what animals will be on Earth?
- No one knows
- Not even David Attenborough?
is this USA-specific? The article is behind a paywall
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/
** CALL FOR PAPERS **
I am co-organizing a session for the #EAA2026 conference in Athens on
"Cross-cultural patterns in small-scale societies: Insights from comparative ethnology"
Submit through EAA website: www.e-a-a.org/EAA2026/EAA2...
and please share with others who might be interested!
New paper out!
We test a simple question: Do people judge the exact same action differently when it’s framed as a ritual rather than something ordinary?
Spoiler: yes!
Check it out here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper published with Claire White and
Matilde Hernu on the self-signaling effects of attending Pope Francis’s Funeral www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Was the Barista Express working?
What happens next? Will you fund the winner?
I wonder whether this is true for all or at least the majority of contexts. Do most people think more favorably of Turkish, Chinese, Greek, or Canadian people than of their respective governments?
My obituary for one of my childhood (and adulthood) heroes, Jane Goodall. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...
@davidwengrow.bsky.social’s talk was so packed at the Brain Bar today was so packed I literally couldn’t fit through the door - I had to pull some special favors to enter from backstage
But it gets more nuanced over time...
Vassar College is hiring a tenure track assistant professor in cognitive science. vassar.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Vassar...
I'll be at #CogSci2025 - happy to chat about the position and life at Vassar.
“Could mundane, often thankless tasks — cycling, tree-planting, recycling — be reframed not as chores, but as rituals of care & connection that inspire a deeper commitment to environmental stewardship?”
— @xygalatas.bsky.social
Using heart rate data to measure emotional synchrony, we show how shared rituals involving chants, flares, and anticipation—bind people emotionally.
Even the team bus driver synced with the crowd.
This isn't just sports. It’s collective effervescence!
🔥📈❤️
Just out in PNAS!
Our new study finds that a pregame ritual created stronger emotional synchrony among football fans than the game itself.
@uconnresearch.bsky.social
Read: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#Science #Rituals #Emotion #Football #CollectiveBehavior
Who needs fancy R packages for graphs, when you can plot them in the sand? Many thanks to @martinlangcz.bsky.social for teaching today's class at our field school in Mauritius
Today, the UK has decided to comply with international law and hand the last British colony in Africa, the Chagos islands, back to Mauritius. On this historic occasion, we were honored to meet with the Chagossian community and share their excitement and hope for a better future.
bringing the lab into the field...
@uconnresearch.bsky.social
Can you explain the grounds for this objection, Rohan? In fields like anthropology, including key informants as participants is becoming increasingly common. Why is that problematic?
But critically, our results introduce a key nuance to these models, which highlights a self-directed function where the experience of discomfort serves not only as a public display but also as an internal self-signal of devotion, reinforcing moral alignment with the ingroup.
This aligns with parochial altruism models positing that altruism and intergroup bias co-evolve to promote within-group cooperation and between-group competition, and evolutionary theories suggesting that effortful ritual acts function as costly signals of commitment to shared beliefs or identities
The more discomfort people experienced, the more they gave to an ingroup (Catholic) charity compared to a neutral one (Red Cross). and this effect was stronger for locals, and those identifying more strongly as Catholics.
As 250,000 gathered in the Vatican to pay their respects, they had to endure queues of up to 8 hours under the hot sun, with limited access to shade, rest, water, and sanitation. After assessing how much discomfort they experienced, we looked at charitable giving to two causes
Check out our new pre-print, reporting findings that the cost of attending Pope Francis's funeral predicts parochial altruism, supporting theories of self-signaling osf.io/preprints/os...
Very excited to see this panel on my book on #Ritual in JCSR, with contributions from an amazing group of scholars in the #Cog&EvoScienceOfReligion! journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/index
