Diego Guevara Beltran

Post Doctoral Associate: Evolutionary Medicine & Human Behavior - HBES The evolve-D lab, under the direction of Siobhán Cully in the Department of Anthropology seeks a postdoctoral researcher to join interdisciplinary projects addressing evolutionary medicine and human b...

📢 Job opening: Rutgers Anthropology is hiring a Postdoctoral Associate in Evolutionary Medicine & Human Behavior
Focus: interdisciplinary research on kinship, gendered labor, disability, and evolutionary medicine.
Priority review: Jan 3, 2026.
www.hbes.com/post-doctora...

In Memoriam Jane B. Lancaster (1935–2025), a Pioneer in Anthropology Click on the article title to read more.

I haven't seen this posted on here but the American Journal of Human Biology has run an In Memoriam on Jane Lancaster:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Thanks again, @epthepod.bsky.social, for having me! 🎧

💬 We discussed three research agendas in quite some depth: exploitation, identity & ingroup favoritism, and heroic behavior.

😊 Dave & David are wonderful hosts! After our conversation, I'm even more enthusiastic...

🫵 Can we inspire you too?

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health - Nature A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

"We therefore encourage policymakers to consider designing interventions to maximize reductions in absolute poverty rather than focusing on inequality per se."

EHBEA awarded a workshop grant this year to researchers aiming to strengthen evolutionary approaches to the study of behaviour in Chile & elsewhere in Latin America, as we're keen to use these awards for outreach beyond our usual community. Congrats to the organisers, & hope the workshop goes well 😊

ASU Psychology is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar to study contemporary antisemitism (supervised by Drs. Neuberg & Barlev). Full-time research, NIH salary scale, start date Jan 12, 2026 (flexible).
Deadline: Dec 17, 2025.
More info: apply.interfolio.com/177756

Taking Stock of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science at the End of the Beginning - David A. Sbarra, 2025

My time as Editor of AMPPS is coming to an end-- here are some parting thoughts. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... .

GenZ version of dplyr in R

Hadley Wickham made a GenZ version of dplyr 😂

hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

Graphic showing the paper title “Monk parakeets ‘test the waters’ when forming new relationships” in the journal Biology Letters. Also features photos of the co-authors (Claire, Annemarie, Gerry, and Liz) as well as the issue cover photo of two marked monk parakeets from Claire’s work grooming each other. Also shown are some of the main plots of the paper showing how the parakeets escalate their behaviors from low risk/low investment (like proximity) to higher risk/higher investment interactions (like preening/grooming)

In an increasingly divided world, how do strangers become friends? Parakeets might have something to teach us! New paper on formation of affiliative relationships, led by Dr. Claire O’Connell doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Missed the deadline?
This just in!! Preconference submissions will remain OPEN until Monday (10/27) at 8 am ET!!! Don’t let this opportunity pass you by! @ahrako.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social #EPatSPSP2026

Friendships aren’t just about keeping score – new psychology research looks at why we help our friends when they need it Friendship isn’t a tit-for-tat balance sheet, but that’s how researchers have traditionally defined it. New studies are refining the model to be less about transactions and truer to real life.

Do we really keep score in our friendship? See what @athenaaktipis.bsky.social and I have to say about why this isn’t always the case theconversation.com/friendships-...

More than a decade of effort went into this magnificent dataset. What an incredible public good. People need to know how hard it is to do rigorous empirical work in political science.

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. 🧵

Happy to see this work published in Psych Review. It's an impressive and important bit of theory/modeling about how we learn about decision-making under risk. Here's a slide with the super-coarse-grained summary of our results. Read the paper for (much) more. osf.io/preprints/so...

I'm so jazzed to finally have this paper out with
@tagerai.bsky.social in @pnas.org! It's probably my favorite paper I've worked on so far. What happens when punishment is incentivized? 🧵
t.co/y5DUUGTdT9

Guilt drives prosociality across 20 countries Nature Human Behaviour - This Registered Report of 7,978 people in 20 countries found that guilt and information about consequences drive prosocial behaviour. Guilt-prone individuals gave more when...

📣 New registered report in @nathumbehav.nature.com with Ivan Soraperra, @jonathanschulz.bsky.social, and Shaul Shalvi: rdcu.be/eAcMA

With data from 7,978 participants in 20 countries, we find that information about negative externalities promotes prosociality, especially in guilt-prone individuals.

In a study of naturally occurring ostracism experiences: After experiencing ostracism, people initially prioritize withdrawal and prosocial coping responses. Prosocial responses increase overtime. Anti-social responses were relatively rare

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Could be, I don’t know, it’s an interesting hypothesis, but that kind of conflates zero-sum thinking with other-regarding motivations— one doesn’t logically follow from the other

That’s a quantitative issue. Zero-sum thinking likely isn’t binary, it likely exists on a continuum and we’re more likely to see it when it fits our interests, and undermine it when it doesn’t

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

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

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Some fun unpublished data from a talk I gave years ago on the sexual division of labor (SDOL) among the Batek of Malaysia.

The Batek have been described as highly gender-egalitarian.

Kirk and Karen Endicott collected the data in 1975-76, back when the Batek were fully nomadic foragers.

A preprint of this work can be found here: osf.io/preprints/ps... (10/10).

In follow-up work, we will examine sources of interdependence, shared fate, and cooperation (1) among dyads to study bidirectional (i.e., partner) effects, (2) whether shared fate guides partner-choice decisions, and (3) consequences for social integration & wellbeing (9/10).

Combined, results support the hypothesis that shared fate provides a proximate solution to partner choice dilemmas: Help partners to the extent that one has a positive stake in their welfare (8/10).

Finally, we show in a follow-up study with a subset of participants (N = 36, Obs. = 108) that shared fate is associated with helping more often in the past two weeks, and actual helping behavior (i.e., forgoing money to purchase a pound of rice for targets) (7/10).

We also find that shared fate statistically mediated all associations between relatedness and helping, suggesting shared fate is a key mechanism by which relatedness structures cooperation in this community (6/10).

However, at the within-person level, relatedness, sharing food (i.e., eating together), and shared subsistence activities (i.e., planting/harvesting, hunting/fishing) emerged as the most diagnostic cues of positive shared fate, and shared fate was associated with helping (5/10).

In bivariate correlations, we find that 8/10 sources of interdependence were correlated with higher shared fate, and shared fate correlated with more helping across 7 fitness-relevant domains (e.g., helping target's children, sharing crops) (4/10).

We wanted to test the idea that shared fate (e.g., "what is good for [target] is good for me") is a summary estimate of the degree to which people share a positive stake with others, and shared fate proximally guides helping towards positively interdependent partners (3/10).

We interviewed people (N = 146, Obs. = 437) about their sources of interdependence (e.g., relatedness, shared subsistence activities, commensality, co-residence, co-religiosity), shared fate, and helping towards an acquaintance, cousin, and a sibling (2/10).