Dorsa Amir

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Wheeled toys were all the rage in the ancient world. Here are four lovely examples: a Greek horse, a Mesopotamian ram, an Iranian hedgehog & a Mesoamerican jaguar. The jaguar one is particularly cool because it shows that Mesoamericans knew about wheels; they just didn't use them for transport.

Somehow I spoke to more anthropologists for my silly little podcast than Yuval Harari did for his bestselling book

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

⚠️ New Postdoc or PhD position open (3 years+) ⚠️

🚩Developmental milestones across cultures 🌍

Based @leuphana.bsky.social , in collaboration with @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Please share/apply!

Link: tinyurl.com/58dsn43u

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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!🙏

Currently housed at the Met: www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

A photo of a green hoodie from Egypt, a tunic with a hood attached.

Child’s tunic with hood, Egypt, ca. 600-900 AD. Turns out hoodies have been around for a while!

Exit Music?!

Ah, so cool!

Where Do the Children Play? On the need for a world without us

In a world without forest and creeks, where do the children play? My new essay explores peer cultures and the strangeness of Western childhood. Heavily inspired by work from @dorsaamir.bsky.social and Sheina Lew-Levy :)
open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...

Thanks for the kind words, Alex!

Varieties of childhood Podcast Episode · Many Minds · 10/07/2025 · 1h 29m

Really enjoyed this podcast with @sheinalew.bsky.social and @dorsaamir.bsky.social on evolution and childhood. Super-smart people talking about a super-interesting topic

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

We do this in Farsi, too!

Another great PhD opportunity: An ERC-funded project on “Children as agents of cultural evolution,” lead by @sheinalew.bsky.social at Durham University. Come do fieldwork with Mayan groups in Belize with her, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, and I! One of three, 3-year PhD positions starting Fall 2026.

1/
Alright, this one’s been sitting in my drawer for a year now, after @mcxfrank.bsky.social and I got turned down for a public commentary.
But before I forget about it completely, here’s the preprint:
Can we harvest insights for rice theory from two state farms in China?

osf.io/preprints/ps...

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Every developmental psychologist Is like “but my lecture slides!”

Literally.

If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after?
The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵

A couple more examples from the same era. Quite stunning, no? And remarkably well preserved. I find these rather moving. Like, you’re actually looking at the faces of people from the past, here they are, looking back at you.

A naturalistic portrait of a woman’s face from a Fayum mummy

While this looks like it could have been painted yesterday, it’s actually a 1,700 year old (!) portrait from a Fayum mummy in modern day Egypt. This is one of ~900 of these portraits from the era, which broke from a more stylized tradition, and represented the subject more naturally.

Some non-obvious advice for psych graduate students Dorsa Amir has an excellent post titled Modest Advice For New Students. If you are going to read one thing about doing well in graduate school, click on the link and read that instead—it’s exhaustive ...

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/some-non-o...

Looking forward to following along! Such a cool project.

@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/...

Other nautical terms we still use:

➡ Flagship:...The ship with the flag; I should have known this one
➡ Taken aback: When a ship's sails are caught aback, pushing the ship backwards
➡ Above board: On or above the open deck, in plain view
➡ Loose cannon: Literally a loose cannon on the ship

Rigging on a carrack from 1500

Been reading recently about attempts to circumnavigate the globe & how 16th century ships pulled it off. Steering a ship was complicated & relied on hundreds of adjustments to complex rope systems. So, it often took a new sailor a long time to..... "learn the ropes"! So that's where that comes from.

Why a Classic Psychology Theory about Vision Has Fallen Apart The downfall of a long-standing theory in psychology raises a question: How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we literally see the world?

Do you fall for the Müller-Lyer optical illusion? Psychologists had long thought that it depends on your cultural background—the famous "carpentered-world" hypothesis. Now, that hypothesis is widely disputed. Here's why. 🧪 by @norabradford.bsky.social
www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions?

In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...