Julien Lie-Panis

Big congratulations to Dr Nikhil Sharma on receiving the Kiel Life Science Postdoc Award 2025! His outstanding work in theoretical biology and evolutionary graph theory makes us proud. Well deserved! 👏 #KLS #MPIEvolBio
www.evolbio.mpg.de/3847270/kiel...

(Photo: Christian Urban, Kiel University)

Waiting time during admission procedures increases social inequalities in higher education | PNAS Many domains in life require people to wait to access better outcomes, such as waiting in line to access prized tickets for a show, waiting to obta...

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS.

Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search

If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

(PDF) Why are lies small? PDF | Deception is common, yet lies are typically small and not easily spotted. The dominant explanations for why this is the case are psychological in... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

"individuals are usually conservative in the size of their lies to prevent punishment from interactions partners, and to maintain a reputation as honest interaction partners"

In case you don't know already, the journal Open Mind has a Bluesky account that automatically posts new papers:
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

The journal is diamond open access (free to read, free to publish) thanks to the support of MIT Press, Harvard Library, & MIT Library.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Preprint: Jan Pfänder and Hugo Mercier "The rational impression account of trust in science"

In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...

M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment

This is the way

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

Resistance to authoritarianism is a coordination game. That's why universities and law firms and nonprofits can't let themselves be picked off one by one. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

My very first paper has just been published in Nature Human Behaviour!

In it, we demonstrate that both a chatbot and a more traditional pedagogical intervention can help improve adolescents' knowledge of vaccines and their attitudes towards vaccination.

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

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#HBES2026 abstract submissions are live! More exciting details to come soon.

Arrive early for @ces2026.bsky.social

@humbehevosoc.bsky.social

Research Fellowships Each year, IAST invites applications for post-doctoral Research Fellowships, which offer candidates an opportunity to devote themselves full-time to their research at the start of their careers. Fello...

📢 Apply to our (2-year) research fellowships at @iast.fr

Join a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and indisciplinary group of scholars in Toulouse, walkable/cyclable pink city of chocolatines in the South of France.

Deadline: November 15, 2025.

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

Morality Is in Our Brain, in Our Genes, and Even in the Structure of the Universe In defense of "Natural Law", Nicholas Baumard explains how modern scientific understanding of evolution actually supports the idea of a moral sense.

"From this point of view, fairness really may be a universal law."

figure 2 from our preprint, reporting the results from two experiments we measure moral judgments about dividing money between two parties and manipulate the degree of asymmetry in the outside options each party has we find that moral judgments track predictions from rational bargaining models like the nash bargaining solution and the kalai-smorodinsky solution in a negotiation context by contrast, in a donation context, moral intuitions completely reverse, instead tracking redistributive and egalitarian principles preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3uqks_v1

the functional form of moral judgment is (sometimes) the nash bargaining solution

new preprint👇

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

A randomized controlled trial on the effect of administrative burden and information costs on social inequalities in early childcare access in France Nature Human Behaviour - This RCT finds that providing information and support to target cognitive and behavioural barriers eliminates early childcare application gaps for low-income and immigrant...

1/ Thrilled to share that my main PhD article has just been published in Nature Human Behaviour! 🎉

👉 “A randomised controlled trial on the effect of administrative burden and information costs on social inequalities in early childcare access in France” rdcu.be/eFAEA

I'm giving a free book talk next Wednesday at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Come by if you're in the Boston area!

👏 Huge congrats to @audeber.bsky.social, group leader and head of our Molecular Diversity of Microbes lab, on being named a 2025 Vallee Scholar! Her pioneering work on ancestral immunity opens new perspectives for biomedical innovation. 🔬🌍

@valleefoundation.bsky.social

#Science #Immunity

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...

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Cooperation with Pat Barclay

This week, we discuss the evolution of cooperation with Pat Barclay.

youtu.be/-cHqagwF1yY?...

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

www.podbean.com/eas/pb-f5gtf...

Very excited to see this published!

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Contractualist Moral Cognition: From the Normative to the Descriptive at Three Levels of Analysis Visual summary of the paper. Taking inspiration from the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy is helpful to better understand morality at three interrelated levels of analysis: Its evolutiona...

Arthur has written a wonderful, clear, super helpful introduction to contractualism as a foundation for moral psychology. Perfect for getting up to speed, teaching, a desk reference, or a sunny day at the beach. wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

So pleased to have won this award. Thank you @ceciliapad.bsky.social @gregoryfiorio.bsky.social @ruthmace.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social

Our paper on the logic of guesses is now out!

We provide a new information-theoretic perspective on many phenomena (old and new) in judgment under uncertainty.
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🚨 Now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🚨

We show that following the news on WhatsApp or Instagram (N = 3,395 🇫🇷🇩🇪) increases current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories, awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news.

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The winners of the HBES Margo Wilson Award (best paper in E&HB the previous year) are Olympia Campbell, Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, Gregory Fiorio, & Ruth Mace for the paper “Genetic markers of cousin marriage and honour cultures”. Congratulations!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ev...

#HBES2026 will be a joint meeting with the Cultural Evolution Society in Rabat, Morocco: CES is May 11-13, HBES is May 13-16, with one day of planned overlap. It’ll be a great chance for cross-pollination between the two evolutionary societies. Come for one conference, stay for both!