@guylavenderforsyth
Research Fellow @ University of Auckland Cultural evolution, cross-cultural psych of politics + religion, causal analysis of language endangerment, & the history of Vanuatu: mixing qualitative + quantitative https://tinyurl.com/guylavenderforsyth
New working paper 🚨🚨🚨
What was the origin of modern economic growth?
Joel Mokyr had a Nobel winning answer - growth took off when science and technology began to reinforce each other
But can we test this quantitatively?
This paper does so – read more ⬇️ 🧵
Extremely proud to have contributed to this amazing three-part Special Issue on Vanuatu languages, out now in Te Reo!
Especial thanks to the wonderful editors for pulling off this major achievement.
You can read my contribution here:
nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...
"The cooperative eye hypothesis proposes that human eyeballs are uniquely conspicuous and evolved under selective pressures to behave cooperatively....but lacks robust empirical support: human eye pigmentation does not uniquely stand out among primates, is not uniform at species level..."
Now out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. In our new article, @denis-cohen.bsky.social @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that where local rent prices increase more, residents with lower incomes become more likely to support the radical right AfD.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
My new paper critically analyses the available evidence (qualitative & quantitative) + defines plausible mechanisms that can be tested in future work with existing data
So stay tuned for more!
Vanuatu’s lingua franca, Bislama, has been learnt by most people as a 2nd language for decades
But it's increasingly the main language of daily life. Linguists' reports reflect growing worries that this is interrupting transmission of local Indigenous languages
What is causing this shift?
Vanuatu is the world’s most language-diverse country: >130 languages amongst 300k people. But is there a language shift ongoing that could threaten this?
The last major review said no. But that was 25 yrs ago. Has the story changed?
In a word––yes.
@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!
3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution
2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.
Please share and apply!
www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...
woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD
Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers!
This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Climate models since the 1970s nailed it—most predicted global warming almost exactly as it happened.
My colleague Quentin Atkinson wrote this piece - How Not To Run a University. It is an insanely good read about how managerialism is destroying universities.
Make time for it. Talk about it. Share it.
quentinatkinson.substack.com/s/how-not-to...
Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"Nasa has revealed a dramatic rise in the intensity of..events such as droughts & floods over the past 5 years. The study shows that..extreme events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting & more severe"
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
I could not be more proud of my lab, and my fantastic colleagues for the study they just published in @nature.com revealing a massive expansion of our species' niche before dispersing out of Africa. Have a read, because it's an amazing paper 🤩
Fascinating - not least on why different datasets produce very different results.
“Historically, no one lived past age 35”
"I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim, including recently from a menopause doctor (implying menopause is not “natural” because noone lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul"
Our recently published paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review on #reasoning styles and #belief in God is now featured by @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social!
Thanks, Jonathan Caballero, for the interesting article.
📄 Read the paper here: doi.org/10.3758/s134...
I was really excited when I saw this study being presented at @icarehb.bsky.social last January and I'm really glad to see the paper out! Amazing record of cultural transmission strategies & cultural traits over 3 million years 🤩
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Very thought provoking
But it's difficult to see how “science cannot be mandated” tackles the incentives for 'fast science', quantity over quality, etc that the best of Open Science aims to overturn
🚨🚨 NEW PRE-PRINT 🚨🚨
Prominent theories in political psychology argue that threat causes increases in conservatism. Early experimental work supported this idea, but many of these studies were (severely) underpowered, and examined only a few threats and ideological DVs. 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧪 New research for the science feed from #anthropology!
Thank you! Yeah it was quite a process but, perhaps like wine, I hope some aging has improved the piece haha
Many thanks to my co-authors/supervisors Quentin Atkinson & Ananish Chaudhuri and to my former PhD student compatriates @scottclaessens.bsky.social & @akfischer.bsky.social for their help in the six years since I first started working on this piece back in 2019!
... by presenting evidence that these political dimensions are not unique to Western or industrialised societies, and are not just products of modernisation/the Enlightenment as some others have suggested
We here extend our previous work on the 'dual evolutionary foundations of politics', which argues that the two dimensions of politics reflect two trade-offs in human group living about cooperation vs competition and autonomy vs social control...
(see www.nature.com/articles/s41...)
We review ethnographic evidence to argue that the political conflicts that we see in Western societies – specifically about fairness in resource sharing and about social control in managing group behaviour – are typical of politics in societies around the world
Extremely happy to see some of my PhD work out in Current Anthropology!
"The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life"
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
