Hugo Mercier's Avatar

Hugo Mercier

@hugoreasoning.bsky.social

Evolutionary and cognitive psychologist. Author, Not Born Yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/yyh929ns), The Enigma of Reason (http://tinyurl.com/6hbpn84).

2,602 Followers  |  1,219 Following  |  132 Posts  |  Joined: 15.05.2023
Posts Following

Posts by Hugo Mercier (@hugoreasoning.bsky.social)

Murders in the Rue Morgue was a parody, I have found the post and the website about it!

The site linked is here
wdl.mcdaniel.edu

And it's really rather good fun, some eyebleedingly bad prose, of course

10.03.2026 02:52 — 👍 99    🔁 40    💬 3    📌 1
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The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

08.03.2026 20:56 — 👍 103    🔁 49    💬 1    📌 2
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The effects of Facebook and Instagram political advertisements on the 2020 US election - Nature Human Behaviour To study the effects of political advertising, we conducted a field experiment with over 60,000 participants. Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds of randomly select...

Great new study of the (lack of) effects of political advertising: "Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds ... did not have a detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, turnout or political participation."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

06.03.2026 08:42 — 👍 9    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 1
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Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

04.03.2026 12:51 — 👍 49    🔁 30    💬 6    📌 3

Economists: we award Nobel Prizes for work on efficient institutions and minimizing transaction costs.
Also Economists: the review process at the American Economic Review.

03.03.2026 17:09 — 👍 173    🔁 40    💬 9    📌 0
Amplifiers of Epistemic Posture Essays and writing on AI

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.

I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.

🧵/

sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

26.02.2026 13:18 — 👍 290    🔁 121    💬 8    📌 33
Fiche de recrutement CDD IR CSS CREST.pdf Nextcloud - a safe home for all your data

🚨Recrutement au CREST @crestumr.bsky.social

Ingénieur de recherche CDD 3 ans support computationnel aux sciences sociales

Venez rejoindre notre cellule données appui au sciences sociales computationnelles !

Fiche de poste ▶️ nextcloud.lab.groupe-genes.fr/s/XMe4EGtRfb...

Candidature < 15 avril

26.02.2026 13:41 — 👍 9    🔁 16    💬 1    📌 0
Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core Explaining the paradoxical effects of poverty on risk taking: The Desperation Threshold Model

In poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories contend that they avoid risk out of caution. Others that they take risks (e.g. crime) out of desperation.

In our new paper in BBS, we show that they are the two sides of the same coin: the desperation threshold.

Peer commentary call soon!

23.02.2026 19:53 — 👍 34    🔁 17    💬 2    📌 0

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)!

How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science.

Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

23.02.2026 18:46 — 👍 42    🔁 27    💬 1    📌 3

In this new paper, @klopfenstein.bsky.social shows that how surprising an explanation is accounts for a good share of its appeal, suggesting that surprising explanations (the aliens built the pyramids!) can be popular even if people aren't really convinced they're great explanation

23.02.2026 13:28 — 👍 15    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0
Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail"
Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

23.02.2026 12:10 — 👍 109    🔁 50    💬 8    📌 5
Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.

Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.

1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'

Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵

20.02.2026 22:20 — 👍 32    🔁 9    💬 3    📌 0
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PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication 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...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

19.02.2026 12:13 — 👍 25    🔁 32    💬 0    📌 6

Félicitations, c'est super !

16.02.2026 23:03 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
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Long format. Enquête sur une supercherie : le prof d’université s’est-il inventé un « Prix Nobel » ? Professeur de Lettres à l’Université Marie & Louis Pasteur de Besançon, le Montbéliardais Florent Montaclair est le lauréat 2016 de la Médaille d’or de philologie, une science qui a pour objet l’étude historique d’une langue par l’analyse critique des textes. Assimilée au Prix Nobel et à la Médaille Fields, cette récompense internationale n’a en réalité aucune existence institutionnelle. C’est un faux. La stratégie qui a été mise en place pour faire croire le contraire, et a abusé beaucoup de monde, y compris le milieu universitaire, est un singulier mélange de sophistication, d’approximation et de culot monstre.

Votre article du dimanche soir: l'invention d'un prix Nobel ou le narcissisme académique dans toute sa splendeur. Incroyable enquête de l'Est Républicain

www.estrepublicain.fr/faits-divers...

15.02.2026 17:24 — 👍 98    🔁 41    💬 14    📌 24

@evoroseman.bsky.social and Auerbach nail the fatal flaw in the ESS: organisms somehow adapt to completely novel situations without natural selection. It's basically Intelligent Design, imo, but with the organism as the intelligent designer instead of God 🧪 #BioAnth 1/2

13.02.2026 14:40 — 👍 12    🔁 2    💬 5    📌 2
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New paper in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Coupling surveys of ~8% of the adult Danish population & results of 123 million covid-tests, we show that psychological feelings of coping lowered infection risk. Feelings of fear did not.

Authorities should empower people, not scare them.

11.02.2026 08:47 — 👍 31    🔁 12    💬 2    📌 1
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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

📢 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

10.02.2026 16:23 — 👍 95    🔁 38    💬 1    📌 4
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🔴 Gallicagram v2, nous voici ! 🔴
Nouvelle interface en react vachement plus stable et rapide, nouveaux corpus (Mediapart, Libé, le Parisien, Le Figaro…), recherche contextuelle, comparaisons inter-corpus, filtre rubrique, bilingue, infinite scrolling... on vous explique tout !

📌 www.gallicagram.com

10.02.2026 12:05 — 👍 174    🔁 84    💬 13    📌 11
Bilbo looking at his phone top

on bottom is ChatGPT

After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it?

You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

28.01.2026 01:51 — 👍 25424    🔁 6950    💬 7    📌 155

[stares directly into the camera]

26.01.2026 15:30 — 👍 10017    🔁 1837    💬 194    📌 30
Wharton-Postdoc - Center on Media, Technology and Democracy

Open Position: Knight Postdoctoral Fellow at Wharton School: Expertise in the quantitative study of the information ecosystem, especially news, media, and advertising.

infodem.upenn.edu/wharton-post...

26.01.2026 16:28 — 👍 4    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0
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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...

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-...

26.01.2026 10:44 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 1
AI Sessions #8: Misinformation, Social Media, and Deepfakes (with Sacha Altay)
YouTube video by Conspicuous Cognition AI Sessions #8: Misinformation, Social Media, and Deepfakes (with Sacha Altay)

Henry Shevlin and I discuss "misinformation", propaganda, mass gullibility, advertising, social media, and deepfakes with the great Sacha Altay (@sachaltay.bsky.social). www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l5T...

24.01.2026 10:28 — 👍 11    🔁 4    💬 2    📌 0
Original post on mastodon.online

Do YOU want updates on the latest research on #FactChecking AI, social media, persuasion, reasoning and #psychology of decision making? Plus additional commentary to put it all in context?

Then YOU need my newsletter, which appears to weekly at the moment

Today: Grok, the "anti-woke" […]

24.01.2026 08:45 — 👍 5    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 1
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Recruitment - Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Political Science 2026 Recruitment 2026 - Sciences Po is recruiting an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Political Science/ Ecological transitions in/of Europe and the European Union.

Dear friends,

We at the Center for European Studies @sciencespo-cee.bsky.social are opening a position of Assistant Professor in political science, with a focus on climate transition policies.

Please apply if you're super good (and not afraid to work with me ;).

www.sciencespo.fr/centre-etude...

22.01.2026 17:38 — 👍 27    🔁 15    💬 0    📌 0
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(Hom)mage du Kremlin. « ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ (le film) est à peu près le meilleur cadeau que nous puissions faire au Kremlin (le vrai). » J’ai posté ce commentaire hier sur les réseaux sociaux, en sortant de l…

Comme promis, un texte où je persiste et signe : le film "Le mage du Kremlin" est dangereux, car il se met au service du pouvoir russe en diffusant une vision du pays exactement conforme à ce que le Kremlin veut nous faire penser.
colinlebedev.fr/2026/01/22/h...

22.01.2026 12:38 — 👍 406    🔁 276    💬 19    📌 29
Consciousness with Michael Graziano
YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Consciousness with Michael Graziano

This week, we are talking to Michael Graziano about the easy problem of consciousness.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qenxi...
youtu.be/O8LEZJvkodc

20.01.2026 16:55 — 👍 4    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

20.01.2026 18:44 — 👍 9145    🔁 2368    💬 144    📌 203