FACULTY
Nicolas Baumard (Group Leader)
I am interested in using evolutionary and psychological approaches in the social sciences, in particular in economics.
More specifically, I use:
- Biological market theory to explain why moral judgments and cooperative behaviors are based on considerations of fairness;
- Life-history theory to explain behavioral variability across culture, history, social classes and developmental stages;
- Dual process theory to explain the content of human reflections and religious thinking (in particular on morality and gods);
- all of the above to explain why some public policies naturally work better
Coralie Chevallier (Group Leader)
I am a behavioural scientist studying the evolutionary and cognitive determinants of social cognition. I have mainly focused on the way motivational factors affect people’s social cognition. More recently I have worked on the way stress, environmental harshness, and uncertainty impact a range of social and non-social decisions:
- prosociality and social trust
- political attitudes and religion
- health attitudes, fertility and parenting
The central hypothesis behind my work is that environmental and motivational factors alter individuals’ minds in significant ways and should be targeted upstream to improve people’s lives.
I was trained as a theoretician in evolutionary biology, and I’m interested in understanding behavior, in particular human behavior, based on an evolutionary perspective. My work focuses on two major questions:
(1) Why is human cooperation universally constrained by the logic of fairness? To answer this question, I develop models in collaboration with Nicolas Baumard and Stéphane Debove. We show that, whereas pairwise reciprocity per se is undertermined (what economists call the folk theorem), the evolution of reciprocal cooperation becomes constrained by fairness principles when individuals can freely engage in a diverse range of social interactions, and choose among them.
(2) Why is reciprocal cooperation so rare among non humans but so frequent in humans? To answer this question, with the help of models, I show that reciprocal cooperation is not a regular form of adaptation that can evolve by natural selection. Rather its evolution, like the evolution of communication, requires the recycling of functions evolved intially for a different purpose. I’m interested in showing how this constraint explains both the rarity of reciprocal cooperation among non-humans, and the form that it takes in humans.
I am currently working on human social cognition, more precisely on the developmental puzzle about false-belief attribution in human childhood. Most preschoolers have been reliably shown to fail verbal false-belief tasks, but growing evidence based on non-verbal tests has also shown that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her (true or false) belief. I take the infant data at face value as evidence of false-belief attribution in human infancy and I propose a pragmatic explanation of the failure of most preschoolers on verbal false-belief tasks.
I am an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist working on the function and workings of reasoning. With Dan Sperber, we have developed the argumentative theory of reasoning, which offers a new function for human reasoning: to find and evaluate arguments so as to convince others and only be convinced when it is appropriate. I also study the cognitive mechanisms with which people evaluate communicated information.
I joined the Institut Nicod in November 2019, as CNRS "chargé de recherche". Before that I lead the "Mint" (Minds & Traditions Research Group) at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. (The group continues its activities.) I study cultural transmission from a perspective that combines quantitative cultural history with cognitive science and cultural evolution. In How Traditions Live and Die (2016), I described how cultural transmission can come about through the action of psychological mechanisms that are indifferent to fidelity but sensitive to content. That same book sketched a research program calling for cognitive science hypotheses to be tested with data coming from quantitative cultural history. I have carried out this research program in several fields, publishing papers on historical changes in the legibility of written letters, on the dissemination of heraldic designs, or the long-term transmission of children's games, among other topics. The common thread running through all these studies is the question: How can human traditions be appealing enough to be passed through successive generations, without losing their distinctive features? One major force for cultural preservation is the development of graphic records: visual symbols that record information, allowing transmission to carry on even when it skips several generations. My latest work, done in large part in collaboration with the Mint research group, thus focuses on graphic communication. We study the evolution of visual symbols, from writing and pictographs to online multi-player games. In the future, I hope to answer some fundamental questions about the nature of writing and the reasons why it appeared only when and where it did.
ASSOCIATE FACULTY
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist, formerly at the CNRS, currently at the Central European University. He has developed a naturalistic approach to culture, “cultural attraction theory.” With Deirdre Wilson, he has developed a cognitive approach to communication, "relevance theory". With Hugo Mercier, he has developed an evolutionary “interactionist” approach to human reason. He has also worked on social ontology, cognitive modularity, morality, epistemic vigilance, and cultural symbolism.
Lou Safra
I am interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying social and political behaviour, notably leader choice and cooperation. In particular, I adopt an ecological and evolutionary approach to better understand the inter-individual differences in these domains, across both space and time. To do so, I rely on behavioral data, social surveys, computational modeling and, more recently, cultural artifacts such as paintings and books.
POST DOCS
Pierre Jacquet
I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in explaining social cognition, and in particular conformism, using evolutionary lense. My project in the Evolution and Social Cognition aims at using life-history theory to study how risk-taking explains inter-individual variability in social learning.
Mauricio Dias Martins
Medical Doctor with a PhD on the Evolution of Language. Previously worked as a neuroscientist investigating the neural bases underlying the representation of hierarchies.
Currently, I focus on the links between human psychology and social change. Like in language, the cultural variation of norms masks underlying similarities. These similarities, akin to a ‘grammar of society’, might result from biological and psychological constraints which limit moral, social and political variation.
In the current project, we text-mine fiction works, from different historical periods and countries, to map signatures of psychological states. We hypothesize that dominant psychological states in fiction might predict historical movements.
Valentin Thouzeau
My goal is to better understand the demographic history and the biological and linguistic evolutions of human and animal populations. I use various frequentist and bayesian statistical methods (Markov chain Monte Carlo, Approximate Bayesian Computation, Machine Learning algorithms), as well as computational modelling and linguistic and genetic data sampling on the field.
PHD STUDENTS
Rita Abdel Sater
I am interested in using nudges and behavioural approaches more generally to promote sustainable behaviour and cooperative behaviour in Paris. I'm interested in applying both economics and psychology to produce more efficient public policies.
Paul Ecoffet
I'm interested in the evolution of cooperation. I am using evolutionary robotics as a modelling and simulation tool in order to introduce a more realistic genotype to phenotype mapping.
Fascinated by apparently irrational beliefs and behaviors, I study the cognitive mechanisms underlying information transmission and evaluation. I try to predict what type of information is more likely to be accepted, transmitted, and memorized. Additionally, I’m working on new techniques of counter-argumentation to change people’s minds efficiently.
Léonard Guillou
I am interested in understanding evolutionary bases of human social behaviors. More specifically I study local adaptations in behaviors. My beginning PhD is about the evolution of social trust throughout History based on the trustworthiness of figurative portraits.
Niels Lettinga
I am trained in social and evolutionary psychology. Therefore, I am interested in explaining social phenomena from an evolutionary perspective. I am particularly interested in human cooperation, morality and mismatch theory. Currently I am using life-history theory to explain human variability in cooperative behavior.
Julien Lie
Fascinated by the scale and extent of human sociality, I look at our social behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. In particular, my goal is to use costly signal theory to help explain certain altruistic conducts. To do this, I rely on computer simulations and mathematical modeling.
Mélusine Boon Falleur
I am interested in understanding the determinants of consumption and in particular materialism. Are individuals who are exposed to harshness, unpredictability or inequality as children more likely to have materialistic values later in life? If we want people to reduce their consumption for environmental reasons, it is useful to understand what are factors of consumerism.
MASTER STUDENTS
Léo Fitouchi
I’m interested in the cognitive adaptations underlying the emergence of human social and moral norms. In particular, I am currently working on the cognitive and evolutionary roots of the cross-culturally recurrent intuitions about moral purity.
Aurore Grandin
I study the cognitive and evolutionary determinants of interest for environmental issues and motivation to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. I'm interested in the application of behavioural sciences to public policies, especially in the domain of sustainable development. I'm currently working on a project about wood stoves pollution with Rita Abdel Sater and Coralie Chevallier.
Loïa Lamarque
I am interested in understanding the evolutionary roots and cultural evolution of family structures. How could evolutionary psychology explain kinship organizations such as marriage rules, residence strategies and inheritance? I am currently working on historical evolutions of socially imposed monogamy.
Edgar Dubourg
Fascinated by the evolution of fiction, and its importance in our lives and culture, I am interested in explaining the cognitive and psychological mechanisms underlying the sharing of sophisticated works of fiction. More specifically, I wish to understand the determinants of individual and collective appeal of fiction in general, and of such and such fiction in particular. I am currently developping a project that would aim to understand the specific attractiveness of sophisticated imaginary worlds, which are developped in very popular works of fiction – such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Games of Thrones.
Charles de Dampierre
I was mainly trained as an economist but I am deeply interested in understanding how evolutionary psychology helps explain people's behaviors when it comes to cooperation, economics and trust. Among other things, my interests go to China and Japan and I am very keen on technology.
Lucien Dabadie
I am working under the supervision of Olivier Morin on a project which aims to test central aspects of the cognitive branch of LHT (centering on morality and cooperation), using a (or several) set of historical data dating back to the Middle Ages and spanning several centuries and geographical areas.
Laudine Carbuccia
After a transdisciplinary bachelor, I’m now interested both in developmental enigmas, as how do concepts emerge as well as in public policies issues, especially when it comes to health. This is why, after a year working on language acquisition and arithmetic acquisition, I will be working with Coralie Chevallier on why aren't physicians following health recommendations.
Research Engineers
Anne-Sophie Hacquin
I work as a Research Engineer with Hugo Mercier and Sacha Altay on information/misinformation transmission and evaluation. I am involved in several projects, from fake news diffusion to the evaluation of trials’ arguments.
ALUMNI
Félix Geoffroy - PhD Student, 2015-2018
Hugo Mell - PhD Student, 2015-2018
Marc Pichot de La Marandais - Master Student (M2) 2017-2018
Christina Ioannou - PhD Student, 2014-2017
Perline Demange - M2 Student, 2016-2017
Stéphane Lambert - PhD Student 2013-2016
Martin Dockendorff - Master Student (M1) 2015-2016, now PhD Student in CEU.
Mona Joly - Master Student (M1) 2015-2016
Chloé Svatek - Master Student (M1) 2015-2016
Charlélie Goldschmidt - Master Student (M1) 2015-2016
Mark Sheskin - Post-doc 2013-2015, now post doc at Yale University
Stéphane Debove - PhD Student 2012-2015
Raphaël Delage - Master Student (M2) 2014-2015.
Céline Dusautois - Master Student (M2) 2014-2015.
Judith Lenglet - Master Student (M2) 2014-2015, now President of Cog'Innov.
Arnaud Poubland - Master Student (M1) 2014-2015
Lucien Castex - Master Student (M2) 2013-2014.
Helena Miton - Master Student (M2) 2013-2014, now PhD student at the CEU in Budapest
Tristan Tissot - Master Student (M2) 2013-2014, now PhD Student in Montpellier University
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