YouTube video by The Bridging Mental Health Network

Menstrual prohibitions—restrictions on food preparation, sex, ritual participation, and contact with valued objects—are widespread across human societ…

Democratic practice in the premodern world was not the exclusive domain of Greece and Rome.

The prevailing view in the literature treats cultural dynamics as fundamentally distinct from other ecological processes—governed by a second system o…

YouTube video by The Cognitations Podcast

Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

Abstract. We present a transparent, human-in-the-loop framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to transform ethnographic texts into binary, structu

Abstract. We present a transparent, human-in-the-loop framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to transform ethnographic texts into binary, structu

Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

Children punish to reciprocate harm (retributive motives) and to prevent future wrongdoing (consequentialist motives). Building on this idea, we wante…

Human leadership and followership take many forms, shaped by the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of our groups and societies. Underlying this complexity, we argue, are key elements of human social psychology regarding social comparison and the resolution of coordination and collective action problems. The Multi-Capital Leadership (MCL) theory posits that leader emergence and effectiveness depend on perceptions of individuals’ abilities to provide benefits or impose costs in solving challenges of group living, through the deployment of different forms of capital: material, social, somatic (e.g., physical formidability, height, immune functionality), and neural (e.g., knowledge, intelligence, personality, supernatural abilities). We integrate this framework with a review of leadership across human societies, including in non-state and non-industrial contexts, and with novel comparative analyses of ethnographic data. This synthesis highlights how context-specific demands for coordination and collective action, and the accuracy of social comparison, shape the structure and dynamics of leadership and followership across cultures.

Substantial minorities of the population report a low degree of trust in science, or endorse conspiracy theories that violate basic scientific knowledge. This m...

New Yorker contributor Singh (Zoostalgia) brilliantly traces the evolution of shamanism across history. Exploring the practice’s...