IACESR 2026 – 10th Biennial Meeting
We’re excited to announce our keynote speakers:
Will Gervais • Rebekah Richert • Quentin Atkinson • Larisa Heiphetz Solomon
📍 Brno, Czech Republic
📅 1–3 July 2026 | Masaryk University
Registration open soon. Stay tuned.
#IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion
Coral background with faint heart illustrations. A glossy male Blackbird with a bright yellow bill faces left. Large title reads: “Birds as bad exes*” Smaller text reads: “*Yes, you read that right.”
Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox
A new article in Nature Medicine found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life.
Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise.
www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...
📢 New Paper 🚨
Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.
In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.
bit.ly/4kvLOwA
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty — across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
This is who runs this account
Evidence for a “Breaking Bad” effect of a cancer diagnosis—>
New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....
New paper - we try to test a classic secularization theory w/ longitudinal data: is material security in early adolescence associated with later decrease in belief in God in young adulthood?
tl;dr: it is, a little bit..
w/ @lnpx1thetadelta.bsky.social & R.Chvaja
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
We’re organizing IACESR 2026 in Brno (July 1–3) — CFP closes Feb 6.
If you work on cognitive or evolutionary approaches to religion, we’d be very happy to welcome you in Brno :)
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.
If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.
eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
He once told me he is usually cited as "(but see Szamado et al.)" after Zahavi citation and that's the extent of engagement with his work for most people🤷
Why do people endorse seemingly extraordinary beliefs such as in pseudoscience & supernatural entities?
Leading approaches stress cognitive biases (like agency detection) & social dynamics (like signaling). Eli Stark-Elster & I argue that experience matters too & put fwd a framework explaining how.
1/ 🧵 New PNAS paper by CCE’s @michealdebarra.bsky.social @aiyanakoka.bsky.social with Angel V Jiménez and Nachita Rosun🎉
📄 Why do people turn to religious or supernatural cures?
🧪🏺
#evolpsy #evolanth #evolutionarybehaviouralsciences #culturalevolution
Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social.
We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures.
All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...
Please share / apply!🙏
A great opportunity for ECRs studying ritual!
New pre-print analyzing 25,000 Christian sermon transcripts across the USA. Churches account for most systematic variance in sermon content, geographic region accounts for none. We identify niches in sermon content that may guide religious competition in USA.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
In our new paper, we show why religious signals can serve as reliable markers of commitment: insiders perceive both cooperative and supernatural benefits in participation, but outsiders—who don’t share those supernatural expectations—see no comparable gains, making the signal not worhtwile
If you're a data scientist interested in a full-time or part-time role working with developmental psychologists on cross-cultural data from parents and children, check out this position with the Developing Belief Network. Application review begins October 15, 2025. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Research poster which says: "What does your favourite literary genre say about you? Help us find out! This 10-15 minute survey for an Oxford Brookes University research project asks questions about books you like to read/listen to, as well as some of your interests, worries & coping styles. https://tinyurl.com/Brookesfictionsurvey" on a background image of books.
We're looking for participants for a 10-15 minute survey asking about your favourite fiction genre, interests, worries & coping styles.
brookeshls.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
We're trying to better understand how engagement with fiction relates to how you engage with the world - let us know!
PsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work!
Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :)
#PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky
Book symposium for Jesper Sørensen’s *Why Cultures Persist* posted online at Religion, Brain and Behavior. With commentaries from, among others, RCC’s Anders Klostergaard Petersen and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social.
www.tandfonline.com/action/showA...
Great stuff! Is there a non-paywalled version please?
Screenshot of title and abstract of paper, "In their God we trust: Religious Cognition increases cooperation across religious divides." Abstract: Belief in moralizing Gods is widely thought to foster cooperation between coreligionists, but there is disagreement regarding whether this effect is limited to the religious ingroup or if it extends to members of religious outgroups. Here we report the results of a cross-cultural research program that demonstrates that people who think about God (a) are more trusted by both coreligionists and members of other religious groups and (b) typically behave in a more trustworthy manner toward both ingroups and outgroups. We ran three preregistered studies (N= 1,784) with Christians and Muslims in the United States, Jews and Muslims in Israel, and Christians and Hindus in Fiji. Our contexts varied in multiple ways, including the level of intergroup conflict. Using two-player trust games involving real money, we varied whether participants interacted with ingroup or outgroup members and whether reciprocators considered God when deciding how much to return to trustors. We nd in each context that making moralizing God beliefs of one player salient enhances both intragroup and intergroup cooperation. Our ndings add to a nascent literature documenting the potential for religious cognition to extend moral norms across intergroup divides. We discuss implications for theories of the emergence of moralizing Gods and implications for public debates about religious pluralism in diverse societies.
Now out in JPSP! Behavioral economic experiments w/ Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews in the U.S., Israel and Fiji show that belief in God can facilitate cooperation, even across religious divides! More about our work (co-led with @jeremyginges.bsky.social) below! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
PCI Psychology is open for submissions! Did you know that you can easily submit your recommended preprint to 20+ PCI Psych friendly journals? See all friendly journals here: psych.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_fr...
#PsychSciSky #SciPub
How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...
New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.
HBES is happy to recognize the following Rising Stars (<8 years post-PhD) for their research contributions:
Mohammad Atari: mohammadatari.com
Catherine Molho: catherinemolho.github.io
Daniel Redhead: www.rug.nl/staff/d.j.re...
Julia Stern: www.uni-bremen.de/en/pppd/team...
Free online for the next two weeks: @bgpurzycki.bsky.social‘s *Morality and the Gods*. www.cambridge.org/core/element...
Folks, it's time to submit your papers to PCI Psychology. Here is our invitation to you, taken from our editorial osf.io/preprints/ps...
