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Guy Lavender Forsyth

@guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social
954 followers 841 following 33 posts

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 tinyurl.com/guylavenderforsyth

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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
... preferences about inequality inform economically conservative attitudes while social control preferences inform socially conservative attitudes. But do these value preferences actually predict different kinds of real-world attitudes? Our work indicates the story is more complex than expected:
Graph showing how preferences for inequality and social control predict attitudes towards ten items about economic conservatism and ten items about social conservatism. Inequality preferences predict all economically conservative attitudes and social control preferences predict most socially conservative attitudes. But inequality preferences unexpectedly also predict socially conservative attitudes more strongly than do social control preferences.
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
📢 preprint 📢 Read it here first! People can be conservative in different ways. A common account distinguishes economic conservatism from social conservatism on the basis of two different sets of values... doi.org/10.31234/osf...
doi.org
OSF
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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Update: we got feedback. It was helpful! So we added a study to address it. In summary, threat-conservatism effects reliably emerge *only* at a very narrow intersection of both DV operationalization (terrorism policy) *and* threat stimuli (terrorism threat). Check it out! 👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Julius Koschnick @juliuskoschnick.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
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 ⬇️ 🧵
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
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...
nzlingsoc.org
Language shift in Vanuatu’s 2020 census: Investigation of a national dataset for 250,000 people - Linguistic Society of New Zealand
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
"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..."
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Look past the cooperative eye hypothesis: reconsidering the evolution of human eye appearance
The external appearance of the human eye has been prominently linked to the evolution of complex sociocognitive functions in our species. The cooperative eye hypothesis (CEH) proposes that human eyeb....
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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
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/...
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
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!
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
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?
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
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.
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
New paper alert! 🧪 www.doi.org/10.1057/s415...
doi.org
Language endangerment in Vanuatu: Bislama likely does pose a threat in the world’s most language-diverse country - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Language endangerment in Vanuatu: Bislama likely does pose a threat in the world’s most language-diverse country
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Sheina Lew-Levy @sheinalew.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
@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/...
durham.ac.uk
Fees and Funding - Durham University
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Josh Luke Davis 🏳️‍🌈 @joshlukedavis.com · 03/09/2025
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...
nature.com
‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother
Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Climate models since the 1970s nailed it—most predicted global warming almost exactly as it happened.
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Prof Nichola Raihani @nicholaraihani.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
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...
quentinatkinson.substack.com
How not to run a university | Quentin’s Substack | Quentin Atkinson | Substack
A case study of one university’s managerial misadventures, why it is happening and what we can do about it. Click to read Quentin’s Substack, by Quentin Atkinson, a Substack publication. Launched a mo...
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Anne Fausto-Sterling @birdlady.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
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Kiran Basava @incertaesedis.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
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...
nature.com
Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database
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David @daverino.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
"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...
theguardian.com
Nasa data reveals dramatic rise in intensity of weather events
Extreme events such as floods and droughts are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more severe, study says
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Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias @ceciliapad.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
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 🤩
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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Fascinating - not least on why different datasets produce very different results.
theconversation.com
Is there really a religious revival in England? Why I’m sceptical of a new report
In Anglican and Catholic churches, average weekly attendance is down about 20% from pre-pandemic levels.
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
“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"
jenndowd.substack.com
There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35.
A demography myth that won't die
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Omid Ghasemi @omidghasemi.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
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...
doi.org
Reflective thinking predicts disbelief in God across 19 countries - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
In the present study, we tested three hypotheses about relationships between reflective thinking, intuitive thinking (both measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT), and belief in God or gods...
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Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias @ceciliapad.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
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...
journals.plos.org
An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years
Humans accumulate an ever-growing body of knowledge that far exceeds the capacity of any single individual or generation. Social learning and transmission are essential for this process. However, how ...
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
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
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Abby Cassario @abbycassario.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
🚨🚨 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...
osf.io
OSF
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
🧪 New research for the science feed from #anthropology!
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Thank you! Yeah it was quite a process but, perhaps like wine, I hope some aging has improved the piece haha
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
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!
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
... 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
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
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...)
nature.com
The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology - Nature Human Behaviour
Claessens et al. propose that the two dimensions of political ideology identified by previous research correspond to two key shifts in the evolution of human group living: a shift towards cooperation ...
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
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
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
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...
journals.uchicago.edu
The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life | Current Anthropology
Many people in Western countries represent the political landscape as a single dimension of conflict: authority, hierarchy, and tradition on the right versus greater freedom, equality, and systemic ch...
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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 18/04/2025
Thing I just learned in #rstats: unz() lets you connect to a .zip and load files from inside it without actually unzipping it (great for a file I'm working with that's 30 MB zipped and 1+ GB unzipped, with multiple CSVs in it)
# unz() lets you connect to a .zip and treat it like a mini file system, 
# and you can load files from inside it
one_zipped_csv_among_others <- readr::read_csv(
  unz("lotsa_zipped_csvs.zip"), "one_csv.csv"
)

# readr::read_csv() can read a .zip with a single CSV in it
one_zipped_csv <- readr::read_csv("big_zipped_file.zip")
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Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at Auckland Uni! Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity. #linguistics #evolution #academia #phd www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
An AI generated colorful image, trying to catch the eye of potential PhD students.
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Dan McGarry @danmcgarry.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
A few words of appreciation for Marc Neil-Jones, founder of the Vanuatu Daily Post. I owe my journalism career to him. village-explainer.kabisan.com/index.php/20...
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Nicholas Gibson @njsgibson.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Religion data for reuse! Those stories about U.S. religion you're currently seeing in the news? They're from the Pew 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study. While anyone can explore the data with their online tools, Pew has also shared the underlying dataset: doi.org/10.58094/3kw...
doi.org
2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) Dataset Archives
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manvir singh @manvir.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Thrilled to see this out! In our new Psych Review paper, we argue that prosocial religious beliefs develop as people strategically push narratives that motivate others to cooperate. We show how this "mutual policing" dynamic explains (among other things) the origins, decline, & varieties of belief.
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Alison Fisk @alisonfisk.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
This little bird survived a volcanic eruption! Buried by volcanic ash from Vesuvius in AD 79, this Roman fresco of a little bird pecking at fruit re-emerged looking as delightful as it did some 2,000 years ago! Villa Poppaea, Oplontis, Italy 📷 by me 2023 #Archaeology
My photo shows detail from a Roman fresco (wall painting) in a corridor at Villa A, the luxurious so-called ‘Villa Poppaea’ at Oplontis (modern day Torre Annunziata) in the Bay of Naples, Italy.

The fresco depicts a small light brown standing on a small pinky-brown wooden shelf, against a vibrant red background panel. The bird is shown in profile, facing left, with plummage painted in various shades of light brown and grey to beautifully depict detail of its feathers. The bird is lowering its head with beak open, about to peck into a fig on the shelf in front. There are two further figs painted behind the bird which have already been pecked into. The figs are painted light brown. The figs which have already been pecked into have cream flesh and red seeds.
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Guy Lavender Forsyth @guylavenderforsyth.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
I'm excited to share that I've just started a new Research Fellow position at the University of Auckland! I'll be working alongside Quentin Atkinson on a project about the connection between religiosity and socially conservative attitudes, so stay tuned for some cool new work!
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Our new Registered Report testing whether secular individuals would be willing to join religious groups when threatened with cooperative insecurity. While this effect was weak in a behavioral test, a self-reported willingness to join was much stronger than anticipated. bit.ly/secularizati...
online.ucpress.edu
Mechanisms of Secularization: Testing Between the Rationalization and Existential Insecurity Theories
The study tests two competing explanations of the secularization process related to rationalizing worldviews and decreasing existential insecurity. While the former explanation argues that people are ...
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Roope Kaaronen @roopekaaronen.net · 04/12/2024
I am delighted to share our latest piece of research: ‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’. This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date. A thread: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A huge phenetic tree visualising our global string figure dataset.
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Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles @siouxsiew.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
It’s a dark day for research in Aotearoa New Zealand and the ramifications for the country are huge. Minister Judith Collins has just announced our blue-skies funder will no longer fund humanities & social science research and that 50% of what is funded must have economic benefit.
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...
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Rachel Leah Childers @donskerclass.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Since I am suddenly inundated with statistics-oriented followers, I should post again that I am still conducting free weekly open office-hours for anyone in the world with Econometrics questions, Wed 10-12AM Eastern or by appointment. Details and sign up at donskerclass.github.io/OfficeHours....
Free Weekly Econometrics Office Hours

Email: davidbchilders@gmail.com or Sign up form: https://forms.gle/yVz8RtVALDXTmv5u7

Time: Wednesdays 10:00-12:00AM Eastern US (or by appointment)

Location: Zoom Link https://bowdoin.zoom.us/j/7322488068

Who: Anyone. Grad students, researchers, government workers. Private sector is okay but in that case if your question requires work that exceeds the allotted time I may request to negotiate a consulting fee.

What I can probably help with: Theory questions. Research design. Modeling.

Particular expertise: Time series. Causal inference. Bayes. Structural approaches. Machine learning.

Theory: Asymptotics. Statistical learning. Bayes/MCMC. Identification. Decision theory. Semiparametrics.

Fields: I know most about macro (DSGE, heterogeneous agents, VARs, etc), but can follow along in applied micro (labor, development, health, etc) & some finance.

Code: I think in R, can write Julia, and can get by in Python. I am likely to suggest you build a model in Stan. I know Stata but if it’s relevant to your question I suspect you can get better help elsewhere.
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David Brady @davebrady72.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Cool paper on “humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids”. Here’s screenshot of abstract:
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Prof Nichola Raihani @nicholaraihani.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
New paper: in what we think is one of the largest meta-analyses of animal behaviour, we find no evidence for inequity aversion in nonhumans (in accept/reject paradigms) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... Led by Oded Ritov & with @engelmann.bsky.social & Christoph Völter
royalsocietypublishing.org
No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Disadvantageous inequity aversion (IA), a negative response to receiving less than others, is a key building block of the human sense of fairness. While some theorize that IA is shared by species acro...
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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) against women is a major public health and inequality concern. It's not clear what causes it or how to reduce it. Gaby Deschamps' JMP considers that IPV is positively correlated with motherhood, and asks if we can understand why. www.gabrieladeschamps.com/research
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