If evolution is to explain our occasionally seemingly strange behaviour *today*, we should be able to link it to our ultimate motivations.
And that is exactly what @edgardubourg.bsky.social does for us:
buff.ly/U39ndvn
My first Substack post asks a question that has followed me since I started thinking within an evolutionary framework: how do ultimate motivations connect to the everyday things we choose to do? open.substack.com/pub/edgardub...
What is it about some stories and situations that make them more effective at evoking fear? One way to answer this is to reverse engineer the emotion of fear 😱
➡️ A short blogpost on the HBES website about our recent article with Coltan Scrivner.
www.hbes.com/engineering-...
#Parution 03/09. Histoire naturelle de la fiction par @edgardubourg.bsky.social aux éd. #HumenSciences #ScienceCQFD www.humensciences.com/livre/Histoi...
L'idée de la psychologie évolutive, c'est que le cerveau humain n'est pas vierge à la naissance et vient avec tout un tas de réseaux, de mécanismes pré-installés @edgardubourg.bsky.social #ScienceCQFD
Très heureux de participer à cette émission !
Our paper shows this generalizes: across 700+ movies, using LLM-based annotations, heart-rate responses, and personality traits, perceived threat tracks the gap between danger and the protagonist’s capacity to resist.
We propose, because horror scales with vulnerability: Pennywise hunts children with almost no capacity to resist; the Joker faces Batman, a trained, powerful opponent.
Why is Pennywise (It) more terrifying than the Joker (Batman)?
Why is It categorized as horror while Batman isn’t—even though Pennywise and the Joker look similar and share equally malicious intentions?
Our research contributes to this hypothesis that curiosity is shaped by current ecological conditions, increasing when life feels safe and contracting in harsher contexts. Here are both the article and the original study.
Glad to see Psychology Today feature our work on how curiosity flexibly adapts to the world around us.
www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evol...
www.edgardubourg.fr/_files/ugd/9...
Read it here: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
(Dubourg, Dheilly, Mercier & Morin, 2025, Psychological Science)
The feature also discusses new work on how children learn to avoid inconvenient information and how humans and AI differ in generalization.
People rely on an intuitive sense of how rare information is, and of the fact that human knowledge is nested.
Excited to see our research highlighted in @psychscience.bsky.social Observer!
With @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social , and Thomas Dheilly, we explored how people infer others’ knowledge: even from a single answer, they can estimate how much someone knows about a topic!
MEDIAS I Très belle chronique de « Histoire naturelle de la fiction» de @edgardubourg.bsky.social @normalesup.bsky.social paru le 03/09 aux éditions Humensciences 👉 bit.ly/4nvYP9C
We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days !
If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September):
psl.eu/agenda/collo...
Merci Le Monde des Livres pour cette lecture attentive et cette belle critique de mon livre…
Awesome!! Congrats!
Happy to share that my first paper is out in Thinking & Reasoning! 📄📢
With Aikaterini Voudouri, @boissinesther.bsky.social & @wimdeneys.bsky.social we show that deliberate reasoning helps not just to correct but also to justify intuitive judgments.
🔗Full paper: shorturl.at/JTeTi
Quick thread below!
Full paper here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
And huge thanks to my collaborators…
By combining cultural history, large-scale datasets, and LLM-based annotation, we can move long-standing debates on the evolution of fiction from speculation to data – and begin to explain why our stories have drifted so far from reality.
The likely drivers are changes in audience psychology: increased trust, reduced puritanism, and greater openness to novelty, all linked to more secure and affluent environments.
Over the long term, we also see gradual increases, with peaks in prosperous periods like the Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty, and Renaissance. Even in antiquity there were highly fictive works, but they were much less common than today.
Across the 20th and 21st centuries, fictiveness rises steadily in novels, films, and Chinese fiction, regardless of genre or language. Box office data show that high-fictiveness films have become increasingly successful over time.
The approach scales to all periods: The Imitation Game (real people and events) has low fictiveness; The Lord of the Rings (invented everything) has very high fictiveness; One Piece (manga) also scores high for fantastical settings, events and characters.
One example: Jurassic Park (1993) scores low for characters (ordinary humans), high for events (reviving dinosaurs through fictional science), and moderate for settings (a realistic island but with invented facilities). The overall fictiveness is thus intermediate.
We checked validity by reviewing random samples and comparing to known genre patterns. As expected, fantasy and science fiction scored highest, biographies and historical dramas lowest. LLM annotations also converged with a second model and with manual checks.
Each work was annotated three times – once for protagonists, once for events, once for settings – yielding more than 195,000 separate evaluations. The model produced a score and a brief justification, and returned “NA” for unfamiliar works.
