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Martin Lang

@martinlangcz.bsky.social
375 followers 443 following 48 posts

Cognitive and evolutionary science of human cooperation with particular interest in signaling, ritual, and religion. Assist Prof at LEVYNA, Masaryk Uni www.martinlang.cz #CogEvoSciRel

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Reposted by Martin Lang
Duncan Stibbard Hawkes @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
⚠️ New Paper! 📣 Egalitarianism has been tied to hunter-gatherer subsistence - but is that justified? In synthesising 30 expert commentaries, we argue that the processes underwriting hunter-gatherer egalitarianism appear in most all human societies; though their efficacy is context dependent.
cambridge.org
Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Beyond egalitarian societies: Egalitarianism as a human universal - Volume 49
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Ruth Mace @ruthmace.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Religious celibacy driven by marriage and wealth inheritance across cultures. brideprice=monks, dowry=nuns. New paper by Gabriel Saffa, Sara Serbaji and yours truly www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Religious celibacy is linked to marriage and wealth transmission practices across different world religions - Nature Communications
Lifelong religious celibacy has been linked to sibling competition over parental wealth. Here, the authors show that celibacy is linked to marriage patterns, and its prevalence among men and women is ...
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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 22/09/2026
So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?
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simine vazire @simine.com · 28/08/2026
Psych Science (the journal) is broader than you might think! Do you do descriptive research? Or research w/ underrepresented populations or cultural frameworks? Or research on AI/LLMs for psych? Or research testing lab findings in the real world? We have a special issue for that!
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Why don’t free-riders fake costly signals of commitment and then enjoy the benefits of cooperation? We show that cooperators and free-riders can attach different subjective values to the same signal, making signaling worthwhile for committed members but unattractive to outsiders. shorturl.at/ognc1
shorturl.at
Differential Cost-Benefit Estimation Stabilizes Cooperative Benefits of Commitment Signals
Communicating group commitment is critical for identifying reliable cooperative partners, and this assortment has been theorized to be facilitated by attaching costs to commitment signals. However, it...
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
If you are eager to learn whats new in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, checkout the microblogging report from our conference by @ferylbadiani.bsky.social. And huge congrats to @kundtova.bsky.social for becoming our new president!
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Feryl Badiani @ferylbadiani.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
New paper out! 🎉 “Godlessness in the Land of Gods: Unravelling Atheism in a Hindu Context” We interviewed 75 Hindus across caste groups and two linguistic communities in India and found that atheism is far from uniform. 🔗: secularismandnonreligion.org/articles/10.... @aiyanakoka.bsky.social
secularismandnonreligion.org
Godlessness in the Land of Gods: Unravelling Atheism in a Hindu Context | Secularism and Nonreligion
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Léo Fitouchi @lfitouchi.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Why do humans punish? Our new paper, with @manvir.bsky.social, is out in Psychological Science! With experiments in a small-scale society (Mentawai) & the US, we test whether punitive cognition evolved to deter wrongdoing or restore fairness. link: tinyurl.com/msrmu7cc pdf: tinyurl.com/mvprz8fb
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Eva Kundtová Klocová @kundtova.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
We are looking forward to everyone coming to Brno in July! Your timely registrations will help us prepare properly!
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Anestis Karasaridis @ane57.is · 27/05/2026
New paper by @martinlangcz.bsky.social et al.!
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
And see the beautiful illustrations by Eva!
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Why do rituals persist? They are often treated either as attempts to influence uncertain outcomes or as practices that regulate group life. But these functions are usually blended together. In our new paper, we argue that reinforcement learning helps explain this blending.
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Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Feryl Badiani (She/Her), LEVYNA, Masaryk University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research. Please join us in congratulating Feryl on this well-deserved recognition!
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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Do supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries? And is this effect stronger in "moralistic" religious traditions (eg Christianity, Hinduism)? Working with some of best & brightest in our field, that's what our new prereg aims to answer: github.com/bgpurzycki/G...
github.com
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Dan McNeish @dmcneish.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
New paper— everyone is collecting intensive longitudinal data but recent review studies report that less than half of studies consider measurement/psychometrics. The paper covers a few foundational psychometric methods for ILD and provides a shiny app to apply them link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com
A primer on intensive longitudinal psychometrics - Behavior Research Methods
Many intensive longitudinal studies are interested in topics that are not always amenable to direct physical measurement and instead are often theorized as latent constructs (e.g., affect, emotion, mo...
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Can distant conflict increase religiosity? Led by R. Chvaja, we found that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was associated with increased religious engagement in nearby countries, but in different groups: mainly among the religious in Czechia, and among the non-religious in Poland. shorturl.at/euxSh
tandfonline.com
How remote conflict shapes religious engagement: the impact of Russian invasion of Ukraine on religiosity in Europe
War and its associated suffering often lead people to turn to religion. Yet, it remains unclear whether this effect is limited to those directly impacted by war or whether the mere anticipation of ...
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
New paper: costly signals are not reliable simply because they are costly. Intuition may help stabilize high-cost signaling, but signal reliability seems to depend on the interaction between intuition and context-sensitive deliberation. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Intuitive and deliberative processes underlying commitment signaling for cooperative assortment
Health sciences
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Meltem Yucel @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨 ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts. internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/
internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com
Become a Member – International Society for Moral Psychology
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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
As the conference gets closer, here’s how to get to Brno for IACESR 2026 ✈️ Fly direct (limited routes) or travel via nearby hubs: Vienna (~2h) • Prague (~2.5–3h) • Bratislava (~1.5–2h) 📅 1–3 July 2026 More info: iacesr.com/conferences/ #IACESR2026 #TravelInfo
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
How does religious conflict reshape moral cognition across cultures? We're hiring a postdoc to help answer that question using computational modeling (DDM, RL) across 20 countries. www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a... #Postdoc #CognitiveScience #ComputationalModeling #MoralPsychology
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Riccardo Fusaroli @fusaroli.eurosky.social · 18/03/2026
People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/
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IACESR Society @iacesr.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
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
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RSPB @rspb.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox
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.”
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
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-...
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Duncan Stibbard Hawkes @dstibbardhawkes.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
📢 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
academic.oup.com
The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable
Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte
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Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
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....
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Current Biology @currentbiology.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
This is who runs this account
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Linda Skitka @lindaskitka.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Evidence for a “Breaking Bad” effect of a cancer diagnosis—>
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Peder M Isager @isager.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....
pedermisager.org
Introducing Causion: A web app for playing with DAGs | Peder M. Isager
Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
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...
cambridge.org
The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core
The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans - Volume 8
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
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 :)
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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
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...
eiko-fried.com
WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried
If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...
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manvir singh @manvir.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
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.
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Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
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
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Christoph Völter @christophvoelter.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
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!🙏
eva.mpg.de
Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
A great opportunity for ECRs studying ritual!
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Matthew I. Billet @matthewibillet.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
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...
osf.io
OSF
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Martin Lang @martinlangcz.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
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
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Nicholas Gibson @njsgibson.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
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...
docs.google.com
Position: Full-Time Data Scientist, Developing Belief Network
Position: Full-Time Data Scientist, Developing Belief Network Description: We are looking for a full-time data scientist to join the Developing Belief Network, a global team of psychologists studying...
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Valerie van Mulukom @herebehumans.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
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!
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.
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Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) @improvingpsych.org · 30/08/2025
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
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Aarhus University's Religion, Cognition, and Culture Unit @rcc-au.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
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...
tandfonline.com
Latest articles from Religion, Brain & Behavior
Browse the latest articles and research from Religion, Brain & Behavior
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Mikey Pasek @mikeypasek.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
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...
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.
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PCI Psychology @psych.peercommunityin.org · 16/07/2025
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
youtube.com
Fate of PCI recommended preprint
YouTube video by Peer Community In
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
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...
elevanth.org
Which Kind of Science Reform
What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.
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Tim Waring @twaring.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.
timwaring.info
Post-Doctoral Position on Cultural Adaptation in Forest Management
The University of Maine seeks a post-doctoral researcher for a two-year project on human cultural adaptation in forest management, requiring a strong quantitative background and experience in modeling.
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Human Behavior & Evolution Society @humbehevosoc.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
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...
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Aarhus University's Religion, Cognition, and Culture Unit @rcc-au.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Free online for the next two weeks: @bgpurzycki.bsky.social‘s *Morality and the Gods*. www.cambridge.org/core/element...
cambridge.org
Morality and the Gods
Cambridge Core - Applied Psychology - Morality and the Gods
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moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
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...
A screenshot from the PCI Psychology editorial
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Heidi Colleran @heidicolleran.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
These are great ideas for all PIs.
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