Prof. Gillian Brown

Behavioural ecology in the twenty-first century - Nature Ecology & Evolution This Perspective discusses how the field of behavioural ecology has contributed to fundamental science and tackling global challenges, ranging from understanding how natural selection leads to adaptat...

This Perspective discusses how the field of behavioural ecology has contributed to fundamental science and global challenges, ranging from understanding how natural selection leads to adaptation to optimizing biocontrol of pest species www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Free to read: rdcu.be/eRKbv

How and for whom can genetics education reduce beliefs in genetic essentialism? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41267401/
"We also find that the 3 intervention curricula are highly effective across sociodemographic group characteristics [...] we offer evidence-based strategies for curriculum development"

Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials - Nature Human Behaviour Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

Are women overrepresented in communal jobs, and men overrepresented in agentic jobs? A test of the assumptions of social role theory: https://osf.io/8azun

In our latest study we reexamined errors in introductory #psychology textbooks. How are they doing compared to our earlier study on books from the early 2010s?

The publisher is allowing 50 free eprints, so grab your copy while you can!

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FVSSQ...

Influence of Familiarity and Sex on Social Learning in a Group Living Fish BehProc

Not all sexual swellings signal fertility. Some signal strategy. In our new Current Biology paper, we show how gelada females “fake it” during male takeovers—and why it works.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7%7E93QW...

Hot off the press! See our new paper: “Three maxims for countering sex essentialism in scientific research” in the journal Biology of Sex Differences. We show how sex essentialism distorts research & propose 3 ways to avoid making these mistakes. (1/12) rdcu.be/eNcRM

1/6 In a new preprint we ask a question:

Why do males and females so often age and die at different rates?

We argue that sex-specific mutation accumulation may be the most parsimonious evolutionary explanation for sex-biased ageing:

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

AI image generated using Google's Gemini.

New paper: "A formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality", with Kalyani Twyman (@kztwyman.bsky.social) #OpenAccess

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

#Image #GoogleGemini @jevbio.bsky.social #OA

Plant Sex: A Cultural Analysis of the Gendering of Plant Reproduction Processes | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 50, No 3 Abstract Scholarship from feminist science, knowledge, and technology (FSTS) studies consistently demonstrates how the production of knowledge about biological processes depends upon gender stereotype...

Shuster et al (2025) on the gendering of plant reproduction processes: "The durability of gender stereotypes in describing plant reproduction reflects deeper tensions in the communication of information by the scientific community." 🧪

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Comparability of personality facets between men and women: A test of measurement invariance in IPIP-NEO facets in 49 countries Identifying whether men and women differ in their personalities, and whether such differences are robust across populations, requires researchers to c…

@timtemizyurek.bsky.social, George Richardson and I agree that 'non-invariance is not black-and-white and does not necessarily thwart scientific progress', as 'evidence for non- invariance can lead to important refinements of instruments or novel findings.'

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rethinking measurement invariance causally Measurement invariance is often touted as a necessary statistical prerequisite for group comparisons. Typically, when there is evidence against measur…

Nice article by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and @boryslaw.bsky.social: 'violations of measurement invariance imply that there are potentially interesting differences in the measurement process between the groups, which could warrant explanations in their own right.' www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For most of us, our physical and mental abilities decline as we age.

Scientists are examining tool use, a technically challenging activity, to learn how ageing affects our close relatives, chimpanzees, something we know very little about.
buff.ly/Tzuw7q2

“A snake with no teeth”: Urbanization shifts perceptions of men who support women’s empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania Achieving gender equality requires the support of all genders, but efforts to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives have been fraught with res…

🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨

We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1939

Our special issue on Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness, coedited with Tecumseh Fitch and Adina Roskies, now online royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Contributions by (1) Irina Mikhalevich; (2) Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg; (3) Nicholas Humphrey; (cont'd)

Transparent and comprehensive statistical reporting is critical for ensuring the credibility, reproducibility, and interpretability of psychological research. This paper offers a structured set of guidelines for reporting statistical analyses in quantitative psychology, emphasizing clarity at both the planning and results stages. Drawing on established recommendations and emerging best practices, we outline key decisions related to hypothesis formulation, sample size justification, preregistration, outlier and missing data handling, statistical model specification, and the interpretation of inferential outcomes. We address considerations across frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and fixed as well as sequential research designs, including guidance on effect size reporting, equivalence testing, and the appropriate treatment of null results. To facilitate implementation of these recommendations, we provide the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology (TSRP) Checklist that researchers can use to systematically evaluate and improve their statistical reporting practices (https://osf.io/t2zpq/). In addition, we provide a curated list of freely available tools, packages, and functions that researchers can use to implement transparent reporting practices in their own analyses to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To illustrate the practical application of these principles, we provide a side-by-side comparison of insufficient versus best-practice reporting using a hypothetical cognitive psychology study. By adopting transparent reporting standards, researchers can improve the robustness of individual studies and facilitate cumulative scientific progress through more reliable meta-analyses and research syntheses.

Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉

As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Researchers face incentives to write up their empirical findings in a way that maximizes publication success. We analyze the language of journal articles and its association with statistical significance to explore questionable research practices at the stage of writing up articles, using 140,606 articles from health, biology, psychology, economics, and multidisciplinary journals over 32 years. For most disciplines, a higher share of non-significant main findings is associated with more hedging and negative striking words, fewer positive striking words, and fewer superlatives. We neither find evidence that authors upsell ambiguous results using sensational language nor that ambiguous results are written up less readably. Contrarily, articles with a higher share of statistically significant main findings are written up more sensationally. We find that emphasis on (marginal) statistical significance increases with the share of non-significant main findings, reflecting a dichotomized interpretation of p-values based on arbitrary thresholds. Particularly, p-excuses give the impression of statistical significance when the finding is actually not significant, consistent with the notion of 'spin'. This study provides empirical insights that might help researchers to self-reflect on writing up empirical findings. More training and fewer incentives to sell findings using sensational language and spin can help to improve academic writing.

"p-Excuses"

E.g., p = .056 is “marginally significant” or “close to being significant”

🔹 Most p-excuses are used in psychology.

🔹 The least p-excuses are used in health.

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

#MetaSci #AcademicSky 🧪

Effects of witnessing subtle gender bias versus rudeness on interpersonal outcomes among women and men - Social Psychology of Education Positive interpersonal peer relationships are noted to be beneficial for learning outcomes and persistence for college students, but these benefits can be hindered when peer interactions include subtl...

A set of experiments looks at the effects of witnessing gender bias in an academic setting, and how they compare to those of witnessing generic rudeness. The negative impacts were greater in the first case, for both men and women. Denise Sekaquaptewa coauthors:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Congrats!

This paper clearly exposes the hereditarian project for the pseudoscience it is 👇 Also highlights how overtly political are those who promote the claim there are evolved racial differences in cognitive and behavioural traits, despite strong protestations to the contrary

This is out now:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Association between lactase persistence and height in the past (indicating people with the persistence allele were better nourished by drinking milk than those without it) provides a potential explanation for why it was under strong selection.

A photo of an adult cradling a baby, emphasizing its large head. Stock photo.

A comparative analysis across all major vertebrate classes finds that large brains evolved only in lineages capable of producing large offspring and maintaining high body temperatures. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Tr8z50Xq2RQ

*Women receive substantially lower "potential" ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings
*Differences in potential ratings account for half of the gender promotion gap
*Women’s lower potential ratings do not reflect future performance: women subsequently outperform male colleagues

The evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No ja

The evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation

-in American Naturalist by @stuwest.bsky.social, @annadewar.bsky.social, @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social, Laurence Belcher, and @asgriffin.bsky.social

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Screenshot of the first page of a Philosophy of Science journal article titled “Tool Use Beyond Humans” by Gianmaria Dani and Grant Ramsey, published by the Philosophy of Science Association. The authors are affiliated with the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. Abstract: The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.

Defining non-human #ToolUse remains contested, complicating scientific generalization & inspiring the concept of “tooling.” Our new 📄 @philscijournal.bsky.social proposes a synthetic framework to advance research on 🔧 use & tooling 👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #philsci #cogsci #evosky #HPbio

Statistical performance of animal cognition meta-analyses at the primary-study and meta-analysis levels. (a) Statistical power: Median power to detect the (true or bias-corrected) meta-analytic effect size; darker red bars indicate lower power. (b) Type M error: Median exaggeration ratio between estimated and true effect sizes; darker blue indicates stronger overestimation (values > 20 shown as “20+”). (c) Type S error: Median probability of obtaining a significant effect in the wrong direction; darker yellow-green indicates higher Type S error. Violin plots above each panel summarise distributions across meta-analyses. Each point represents one meta-analysis (matching a row in the bar plots), and the horizontal line denotes the overall mean.

"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal"
doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...

This is figure 1, which is a map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and a timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

A paper in Nature Communications presents archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, and the study’s findings suggests continuity in tool-making practices over 300,000 years, with evidence of systematic selection of rock types. go.nature.com/3WJnBrK 🏺 🧪

Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals Abstract. The length of gestation in eutherian mammals, which is key to their reproductive success, is closely connected to other life history traits, body

Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Thodoris Danis et al.