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Edgar Dubourg

@edgardubourg.bsky.social
225 followers 53 following 163 posts

I am a cognitive scientist studying how evolved motivations shape culture.

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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Our paper 'Carving Stories at Their Natural Joints' is out in Psychological Review (@apajournals.bsky.social). It means a lot to me, especially because I got to collaborate with many researchers from different disciplines whose work I truly admire.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Readers often judge a novel less favorably when told it was written by AI. My new essay explores why it should be the case. edgardubourg.substack.com/p/the-novel-...
edgardubourg.substack.com
The Novel Was Great… Until Somebody Said AI
A prize-winning French novel is accused of being written by AI. The interesting question is why that would matter.
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Daniel Nettle @danielnettle.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Pleased to announce the publication of the second edition of 'From Questions to Knowledge: Data Analysis for Psychology and Behavioural Science Using R' mybook.to/questionstok...
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Many studies of AI and learning ask what people can still do once AI is removed. I believe this is only half the question, and maybe not the most interesting half. edgardubourg.substack.com/p/is-ai-maki...
edgardubourg.substack.com
Is AI Making Us Stupid? We Won’t Find Out by Taking It Away
Why testing what people can do without AI tells us only half the story
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Everyone seems to agree that Instagram and TikTok destroyed our attention spans. Meanwhile the biggest film in the world right now, Nolan's Odyssey, asks three hours of our time and people keep showing up (it is by now the biggest release of Nolan's career). edgardubourg.substack.com/p/attention-...
edgardubourg.substack.com
Attention Is Not Scarce, It Is Expensive
Or why you probably won’t finish this post.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
New paper with @sachaltay.bsky.social! A lot of people think AI can only make science worse. We argue agentic AI can actually be a great tool to do it better!
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
New commentary with Nicolas Baumard in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, on Ko & Neuberg's target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... We argue for distinguishing two kinds of ecological input…
cambridge.org
Distinguishing regulatory variables and ecological affordances: Prioritizing goals versus implementing action | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Distinguishing regulatory variables and ecological affordances: Prioritizing goals versus implementing action - Volume 49
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
New in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ( @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social)👇 Why do people who love abstract art or imaginary worlds 🎨 also tend to get vaccinated 💉, support redistribution 💸, endorse animal rights 🐥, and try novel foods 🫐?
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Really proud to have contributed to this review. It feels like a step toward validating an idea that is still underexplored: video games are a rich and largely untapped resource for cognitive and behavioral scientists.
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Sylvain Estebe @sylvainestebe.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
First time in Leiden, and my first academic talk at @ehbea2026.bsky.social. Grateful to @ehbea.bsky.social for the Student Travel Grant and for a conference and community that was genuinely welcoming 🧵
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
If evolution is to explain our occasionally seemingly strange behaviour *today*, we should be able to link it to our ultimate motivations. And that is exactly what @edgardubourg.bsky.social does for us: buff.ly/U39ndvn
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
My first Substack post asks a question that has followed me since I started thinking within an evolutionary framework: how do ultimate motivations connect to the everyday things we choose to do? open.substack.com/pub/edgardub...
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear 😱 ➡️ A short blogpost on the HBES website about our recent article with Coltan Scrivner. www.hbes.com/engineering-...
hbes.com
Engineering Fear: Protagonist Vulnerability and the Evolutionary Design of Horror - HBES
– by Edgar Dubourg and Coltan Scrivner What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear. Ou...
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La Science, CQFD @sciencecqfd.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
#Parution 03/09. Histoire naturelle de la fiction par @edgardubourg.bsky.social aux éd. #HumenSciences #ScienceCQFD www.humensciences.com/livre/Histoi...
humensciences.com
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La Science, CQFD @sciencecqfd.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
L'idée de la psychologie évolutive, c'est que le cerveau humain n'est pas vierge à la naissance et vient avec tout un tas de réseaux, de mécanismes pré-installés @edgardubourg.bsky.social #ScienceCQFD
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Très heureux de participer à cette émission !
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Why is Pennywise (It) more terrifying than the Joker (Batman)? Why is It categorized as horror while Batman isn’t—even though Pennywise and the Joker look similar and share equally malicious intentions?
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Glad to see Psychology Today feature our work on how curiosity flexibly adapts to the world around us. www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evol... www.edgardubourg.fr/_files/ugd/9...
psychologytoday.com
The Ecology of Curiosity
Why are some people naturally curious while others avoid the unknown? A new study suggests it’s not just personality—it’s ecology.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Excited to see our research highlighted in @psychscience.bsky.social Observer! With @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social , and Thomas Dheilly, we explored how people infer others’ knowledge: even from a single answer, they can estimate how much someone knows about a topic!
psychologicalscience.org
Unearthing the Nature of Knowing
Research reveals how people process information, how they acquire—and sometimes reject—knowledge, and how that compares to artificial intelligence systems’ abilities to do the same.
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Cognition ENS @cognitionens.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
MEDIAS I Très belle chronique de « Histoire naturelle de la fiction» de @edgardubourg.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social paru le 03/09 aux éditions Humensciences 👉 bit.ly/4nvYP9C
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Jean-Baptiste Camps @jbcamps.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...
psl.eu
Colloque inaugural du Grand programme de recherche CultureLab | PSL
Recherche, CultureLab inaugure ses travaux le 22 septembre 2025 au Campus Condorcet avec une journée consacrée aux sciences humaines et sociales computationnelles et à l’évolution culturelle. , Le Gra...
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
Merci Le Monde des Livres pour cette lecture attentive et cette belle critique de mon livre…
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Nicolas Beauvais @nicolasbeauvais.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢 With Aikaterini Voudouri, @boissinesther.bsky.social & @wimdeneys.bsky.social we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments. 🔗Full paper: shorturl.at/JTeTi Quick thread below!
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
Today’s popular fictions can be extremely far from reality: The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Legend of Zelda, Avengers: Endgame. But has this always been the case?
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
I’ve long wanted to explore horror, and I did it with the very person who helped crack the paradox of horror… We looked at what makes horror scary. Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
We often have to judge who is knowledgeable—precisely when we are not. Can humans really do that? Our new paper in Psychological Science shows that, surprisingly, we can. drive.google.com/file/d/1b15E...
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
A great opportunity for a PhD Scolarship at the new CultureLab (Paris), at the intersection of the humanities, the computational sciences, and cultural evolution!
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Imaginary worlds like Star Wars and Game of Thrones dominate global culture. Are they really a recent phenomenon, or have they always been central to storytelling? In our latest paper, we investigate the historical trajectory of imaginary worlds with new large-scale data.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Et vous pouvez tester votre profile de gamers ici 👉 www.the-deepmodel.fr 👈
xn--th-yl72a
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
From Tetris to Zelda, to Elden Ring and League of Legends… our new paper with @valerian-chambon.bsky.social, published in Entertainment Comuting delves into the diversity of video games and gamers' preferences 🎮. We present a cognitive framework for understanding this diversity. ⬇️
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
👏
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
Timely indeed 😍🧸
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
In response to the fantastic article by @koumurayama.bsky.social & Hayley Jach on the importance of unpacking motivation constructs, we explain how evolutionary psychologists try to do this by studying input-output relationships in a way that aligns with adaptive function.
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Super happy to have contributed to this project. We asked people to report their enjoyment while experiencing different kinds of curiosity (insight, exploration, morbid) in different kinds of media (novels, movies, video games, non fiction). Check Marius' post for the results!
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Jean-Baptiste André @jbaptistandre.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Do we cooperate because of institutions, or do institutions exist because we cooperate? In this @pnas.org paper led by @jliep.bsky.social, with @lfitouchi.bsky.social & N. Baumard, we develop a mathematical model that answers this question. 👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Feeling lucky and grateful for me and my students to have welcomed researchers whose work on fiction I deeply admire and find so inspiring (@marchye.bsky.social, @mathiasclasen, @maryannefisher). Thanks to them and to my students for an incredibly insightful semester!
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Jan Pfänder @janpfa.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Can we trust a group of people to be right, and to be competent, simply because they agree on something? In a new paper in Cognition, @bdecourson.bsky.social, @hugoreasoning.bsky.social and I argue that yes, in many cases we can. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kA8Q2Hx2x... 1/
authors.elsevier.com
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 13/02/2024
Why do we enjoy fictional stories? @edgardubourg.bsky.social et al argue their features activate psychological mechanisms that evolved long before we started telling stories, with sensitivity to certain mechanisms explaining preferences for certain story ingredients: bit.ly/3Ojwlki
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 14/12/2023
New preprint about GPT's or other LLMs' application in psychology, history, anthropology. Not about whether we can or should use it… But about how to use it! We propose a step-by-step guide to use GPT as a cultural annotator for (big) cultural dataset - osf.io/zuejp
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Edgar Dubourg @edgardubourg.bsky.social · 13/11/2023
New chapter in the fantastic Routledge Handbook of fiction and belief. With Nicolas Baumard, we review a wide range of evidence coming from psychology, economics & behavioral sciences, to try to know whether fiction consumption impacts our thoughts and behaviors.
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Emily Liquin @emilyliquin.bsky.social · 16/10/2023
Hi Bluesky! I’m recruiting PhD students to help launch the Exploration, Learning, and Mind Lab at U of New Hampshire Psych in Fall 2024! Check out our lab website at liquinlab.github.io for more info, and feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in applying! #CogSci #DevPsych #PsychSciSky
liquinlab.github.io
ELM Lab @ UNH
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Hugo Mercier @hugoreasoning.bsky.social · 10/10/2023
Daniel Nettle is looking for a grad student and a postdoc to work on his fantastic THRESHOLD project, more information there www.danielnettle.org.uk/2023/10/10/t...
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Coralie Chevallier @coraliechevallier.bsky.social · 07/10/2023
New paper with Mathilde Mus and Hugo Mercier on designing an acceptable and fair carbon tax: journals.plos.org/climate/arti...
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