The project "Défis comportementaux dans la crise du Covid- 19 : le cas de l'hygiène des mains" carried by Coralie Chevallier and Hugo Mercier, members of the team Evolution et Social Cognition, has been selected.
Adolescence, defined as 10-24 years, is a period of life often characterised by behaviours that can appear, prima facie, irrational such as dangerous risk-taking and impulsivity. However, these behaviours can be interpreted as adaptive and rational given that a key developmental goal of this period of life is to mature into an independent adult while navigating a social world that is unstable and changing.
What are the main principles to follow when communicating with the public? How can we foster cooperation from all sides? How is trust built? Why does it take more energy to get recommendations accepted than it does to combat "fake news"?
Western history of thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought. Yet people often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. Using examples from a wide range of domains, we demonstrate that deliberate ignorance has important functions. We systematize types of deliberate ignorance, describe their functions, discuss their normative desirability, and consider how they can be modeled.
Language is a product of learning in individuals, and universal structural features of language presumably reflect properties of the way in which we learn. But language is not necessarily a direct reflection of properties of individual learners: languages are culturally-transmitted systems, which persist in populations via a repeated cycle of learning and use, where learners learn from linguistic data which represents the communicative behaviour of other individuals who learnt their language in the same way.
For research and policy-development in public health, it is crucial to understand the spread of ideas and beliefs as well as diseases. Conspiracy theories about secret agendas behind vaccination programmes, the side effects of medical treatments, and cover-ups by the government or pharmaceutical industry are prevalent in many countries and can have devastating effects on health and well-being.
The uptake of a fertility-reducing technology, such a modern contraception, directly challenges Darwinian notions of fitness. Evolutionary approaches have proposed numerous mechanisms for explaining the origins, spread and maintenance of low fertility through the adoption of fertility-reducing behaviour. However, the literature has not yet engaged with the reversible dynamics of contraceptive behaviour at the individual level (adopt, discontinue, re-adopt).
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The alarming spread of entirely fabricated news stories - "fake news" - during the 2016 US Presidential election is a salient example of how human reasoning often fails. How do we explain such errors? I will outline two broad perspectives on this question with different implications for understanding cognitive capacity and knowledge resistance. One argues that humans reason like good lawyers, and that cognitive sophistication increases political polarization.
A central feature of our species is our unprecedented capacity to develop increasingly complex technologies that have allowed us to colonize and permanently occupy environments for which we are poorly suited biologically. Those technologies have emerged through a process - known as cumulative cultural evolution - that is powered by our strategic reliance on social information and results in the gradual accumulation of innovations.
