Léo Fitouchi

Thanks a lot!!

Thank you Oleg!

Thanks Jorge!! I wil!

Merci Hugo!!

Thank you!

Yes with pleasure! I also enjoyed your last punishment paper very much

In a new paper with @evadavoine.bsky.social @enguehard.bsky.social & I. Kolesnikov, we build a historical GIS of a core fiscal institution in early modern France: the gabelle (salt tax). It generated up to 25% of tax revenue and sparked intense popular resistance.

👉 hal.science/hal-05501504

🧵1/7

Looking forward to work with @fierycushman.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social on the moral psychology of authority!

New @aeon.co essay just out! On how institutions let us scale trust and cooperation - and when things start to unravel.

Big thanks to editor Sam Dresser.

For the more technical version, see thread & paper below👇

Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences Application Application to the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences taking place from May 25th to June 19th, 2026 in Toulouse, France Application deadline: January 15th, 2026 Applicants will be ...

Applications for our upcoming Summer School have been extended until January 15! 🤝

Apply now: www.tse-fr.eu/toulouse-sum...

@olkcampbell.bsky.social @maximederex.bsky.social @lfitouchi.bsky.social @cmolho.bsky.social @ccavaille.bsky.social

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Moralizing Self-Control with Léo Fetuchi

This week, we talk to Léo Fetuchi about the moralization of self-control and the lack thereof.
youtu.be/duLUU9e0i0k
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-99f5i...

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Evolutionary Social Sciences with Dan Nettle

This week, we talk to @danielnettle.bsky.social about big picture issues in the evolutionary social sciences, craving sugar, income inequality, running, and more!
youtu.be/-NPuZSolsEs
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-9hsnf...

How experience shapes extraordinary beliefs The ubiquity of extraordinary beliefs across human societies, such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and supernatural beliefs, is a long-standing…

In a new Review for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social -- and my first first-authored paper! -- @manvir.bsky.social and I argue that experience shapes the emergence and evolution of seemingly extraordinary beliefs.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For the curious, I have put the author accepted manuscript of our new BBS Target Article on researchgate.

You can view it here:

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Thrilled to teach again this year, on the evolution of social cognition, at the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences! Apply before December 15th 👇

Brochure: lnkd.in/e_R7cQTP
Application: lnkd.in/eey-fEJ

📣 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...

Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences Application Application to the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences taking place from May 25th to June 19th, 2026 in Toulouse, France Application deadline: December 15th, 2025 Applicants will be...

Happy #WplusEBSWednesday, folks!

This week, we're spotlighting the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences (May 26–June 19), hosted by @tse-fr.eu and @iast.fr .

Applications due Dec. 15!

Great opportunity for PhD students - check it out at the link :)
www.tse-fr.eu/toulouse-sum...

It's hiring season at @iast.fr!

- 2y research postdoc contract
- Full autonomy, you are your own PI
- Awesome multidisciplinary environment
- All social and behavioral sciences welcome
- Seed funding for projects and workshops
- Gorgeous city in the south of France

www.iast.fr/research-fel...

👋 Meet Haneul, our Membership Officer/Treasurer!

@haneuljang.bsky.social is a Research Fellow at @iast.fr, studying women's cooperation among BaYaka foragers.

As Membership Officer, she manages new membership, recruiting new members at conferences and explaining the society. (1/2)

#WplusEBS

The Multi-Capital Leadership Theory - Human Nature Human leadership and followership take many forms, shaped by the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of our groups and societies. Underlying this complexity, we argue, are key elements of human social psychology regarding social comparison and the resolution of coordination and collective action problems. The Multi-Capital Leadership (MCL) theory posits that leader emergence and effectiveness depend on perceptions of individuals’ abilities to provide benefits or impose costs in solving challenges of group living, through the deployment of different forms of capital: material, social, somatic (e.g., physical formidability, height, immune functionality), and neural (e.g., knowledge, intelligence, personality, supernatural abilities). We integrate this framework with a review of leadership across human societies, including in non-state and non-industrial contexts, and with novel comparative analyses of ethnographic data. This synthesis highlights how context-specific demands for coordination and collective action, and the accuracy of social comparison, shape the structure and dynamics of leadership and followership across cultures.

>The Multi-Capital Leadership theory explains why #leadership emerges and why it varies among human societies and throughout individual life histories.

w/@chrisvonrueden.bsky.social & @edhagen.net

#LeadSciSky #HBES 🧪

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

thank you to all speakers for all the food for thought!

Strategy and experience required: Social learning cannot explain the varieties of supernatural belief Published in Religion, Brain & Behavior (Ahead of Print, 2025)

New commentary out w/ @manvir.bsky.social
in Religion, Brain, and Behavior! We argue that social learning fails to explain three patterns in religious belief and practice: SBNR beliefs, strategic endorsement of beliefs, and religious experience. Check it out:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🧠 What?! A meeting just on disgust?! Yes!!
📍 @iast.fr, France | 🗓 Dec 4–5, 2025
💥 Keynotes by Paul Rozin @upenn.edu, @cr-amo.bsky.social, Philip Powell @sheffielduni.bsky.social & Cindy Kam
🌍 From Psychology to Politics, Biology & beyond
🎓 Abstract submissions until Aug 31: forms.gle/QBmkUB3aLDjY...

📣 We are excited (or should we say disgusted?) to announce the conference 'Disgust across borders' at IAST! @iast.fr

🗓️ Join us on Dec 4 & 5 for two days full of disgust research across species and disciplines.

Registration and abstract submission are open (until Aug 31): forms.gle/QBmkUB3aLDjY...

I had the most incredible opportunity to attend the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences at @tse-fr.eu and learn from @lfitouchi.bsky.social , @cmolho.bsky.social & @jorgeapenas.bsky.social on the "Evolution of Human Sociality"
Toulouse was warm and welcoming, so was TSE !!

Actually, we checked for halo effect by also measuring perceptions of warmth. In many conditions, people do not expect lower warmth to follow—only lower self-control or cooperativeness. So, as far as we can tell, it doesn't look like a halo effect.

Pan-African metapopulation model explains Homo sapiens genetic and morphological evolution Emerging evidence has challenged the traditional view of a single-region origin for Homo sapiens, suggesting instead that our species arose and diversified across multiple geographically distinct popu...

🚨NEW PAPER from the @eegcam.bsky.social!🚨I have never been as proud of something as of the work that finally we can share today: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - we show how a climatically driven Pan African meta population model explains our species genetic and morphological diversity 🧬💀

"progress in the social sciences is stymied by the widespread misconception that evolution and learning are opposing explanations for behavior... the 'evolution vs. learning' dichotomy is fallacious... explanatory partners rather than explanatory competitors" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

"Shamanism" by @manvir.bsky.social is now out. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730339.... It's a deep, original, and fun book—highly recommended. My blurb:

Very happy to be giving a talk at my favorite colloquium series! Tune in if you're interested in prosociality, willful ignorance, or cross-cultural research.