Mike Moncrieff

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market | PNAS There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵

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

Released today!
SEVEN DECADES: HOW WE EVOLVED TO LIVE LONGER
Now available at your favorite bookseller.

Leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon if you can.

Please help spread the word!

#sevendecades @princetonupress.bsky.social

Evolutionary psychology reveals patterns in mass murder motivations across life stages Mass murderers tend to be either socially rejected young men or middle-aged men facing personal collapse, according to a new systematic review. The findings highlight how developmental stage and stress exposure shape violent behavior through evolved psychological mechanisms.

Evolutionary psychology reveals patterns in mass murder motivations across life stages

This New Yorker essay about New Yorker fact-checkers is terrific.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Bimodal Age Distribution of Mass Murder: a Systematic Review Using Evolutionary and Life History Perspectives - Evolutionary Psychological Science Research has identified a bimodal age distribution among mass murderers, with younger offenders typically in late adolescence and older offenders in middle age. An evolutionary perspective offers a co...

This article dovetails well with my ongoing research on the status threat regulatory system and its links to envy and violence. Looking forward to seeing how @keithminihane.bsky.social and his colleagues continue advancing this important line of work.

“People who have difficulty identifying and expressing emotions are more likely to endorse causing harm if it benefits the greater good.” I would reverse this causal logic and propose additional mechanisms. Essentially, those observed features are symptoms(rather than causes)of a functional system.

Ecstatic to be on @epthepod.bsky.social with @davidpinsof.bsky.social and @dpietra.bsky.social. A rare chance to talk in depth about my work, especially with such exceptional colleagues.

Highly recommend their other episodes too!

Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with 3 group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a coordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to coordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signaling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviors that those identities function to afford.

New preprint w/ Nathan Gabriel & @avbell.bsky.social: The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies

The model tackles multiple nested/overlapping identities and complex signaling structure. Recovers lots of old results and adds several new ones osf.io/preprints/so...

Political violence is surging as Trump kills prevention efforts, a top security expert warns Former DHS official William Braniff talks about building an innovative model for stopping terrorism—and how its loss may harm America.

As Political Violence Surges, Trump Shuts Down a Top Prevention Program

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Meet the speakers behind our #WplusEBS panel at #HBES2025:

“Gender and identity in the evolutionary human sciences”
🗓️Friday, June 6th
⏰4:50pm - 6:10pm

We’re highlighting each panelist in this thread so read on! 👇1/6

LGBTQ+ or an ally? Don't miss the LGBTQ+ Networking & Social Event at #HBES2025, Atlantic City! 🌈 / June 4 at 8 PM at 10 North Lounge inside the Tropicana. Make new friends, reconnect with old ones, and spark collaborations. Questions? Contact @mbarlev.bsky.social or @mikemoncrieff.bsky.social

🙌 can’t wait for this!

Damn typo… 😆

I am too (for broader reasons), which is says much as a citizen.

Envy and Jealousy: An Evolutionarily Informed Typology of Global Mass Murder - Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology This study uses latent class analysis to examine a global sample of mass murderers, identifying two distinct offender categories analyzed through an evolutionary lens. “Envy type” offenders were typic...

New research reinforces the link between envy and mass violence: ‘Manifestos of envious mass murderers show narcissism, grievances, and desire for social/romantic status.’ bit.ly/4bJyz70. This aligns with my own research on envy’s role in radicalization.

The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.

Indeed, I think this is exactly why the internet plays such a prominent role in the radicalization process. Hitting upon collectively endorsed justifications likely green-lights harmful actions.

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research"

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

‘A perfect storm’: Extremism online and political polarization are increasing risk of attacks, experts say Accessing extremism online has never been easier, the threat has never been higher, and the ideology of those conducting attacks has never been more splintered.

Arie is right, and envy is responsible for such violent responses to perceptions of lowered status. “‘When people feel disempowered because of immigration, economic inequalities […] they are motivated [and] may be compelled to take violent action...” bit.ly/4iZ5iZf

Direct perception of affective valence from vision Nature Communications - The authors show that affective valence is tied to visual processing. They identify a direct route from visual features to valence experience, separate from higher-order...

New paper from Adam Anderson's lab at Cornell showing evidence of visual "affective affordances" - predicting human valence ratings from low level image statistics independently of centrally modulated valence arising from image content and arousal. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Envy, Emotional Urgency, and Radicalization: The Impulsive Route is Paved in Malice Impulsivity is recognized as a significant radicalization risk factor, yet its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Previous research suggests that impulsive actions are emotionally driven. If so,...

Building on the idea that emotions act as superordinate programs coordinating psycho-physiological responses, we highlight how impulsive actions—being inherently emotional—are key to understanding this pathway. Read more: doi.org/10.1080/0954...

In this pathway, neutralizing perceived social competitors overrides strategies like competition or avoidance. Envy orchestrates radicalization’s effects, such as target fixation, goal preoccupation, and aggression.

Envy, Emotional Urgency, and Radicalization: The Impulsive Route is Paved in Malice Impulsivity is recognized as a significant radicalization risk factor, yet its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Previous research suggests that impulsive actions are emotionally driven. If so,...

Why is impulsivity so strongly linked to radicalization? Our findings show that envy connects impulsivity to radicalization, revealing an ‘impulsive-envious pathway’ to aggression. 🧵

From Envy to Radicalization - Evolutionary Psychological Science Models of radicalization have typically placed grievances at the heart of radicalization. In contrast, we argue that viewing the radicalizing agent as decidedly proactive, and less reactive, better ac...

The UnitedHealth assailant exemplifies envious radicalization: a rapid decline in social status, a zero-sum framing of the situation, the search for perceived causal agents, and the drive to eliminate or depower them through violence. See: doi.org/10.1007/s408...

Over one year and still missing Pierre. The moments we spent working together will always be among the best of my life. So proud of what we were able to discover. I’m so thrilled to share the next round of publications (coming soon) as a result of our friendship.

Come join my team as we close out and celebrate our last 6 years of research! It’s bitter sweet as I will certainly miss working so closely with such an amazing team of brilliant scholars and the many others who we have been so fortunate to have as dear friends and collaborators.

lnkd.in/eUAgJCge

From Envy to Radicalization - Evolutionary Psychological Science Models of radicalization have typically placed grievances at the heart of radicalization. In contrast, we argue that viewing the radicalizing agent as decidedly proactive, and less reactive, better ac...

What psychological mechanisms drive the dramatic changes observed during radicalization? We argue that the functional mechanisms of envy should take center stage in future research.

Excited to celebrate this article’s one-year anniversary at the end of the month!

Making the move from X.