New in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ( @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social)👇
Why do people who love abstract art or imaginary worlds 🎨 also tend to get vaccinated 💉, support redistribution 💸, endorse animal rights 🐥, and try novel foods 🫐?
Regulatory variables (kin density, resource availability, threat presence) calibrate how salient a motivation is. Affordances (a bakery, a trail, an open-world game) are local possibilities for action that only matter once a motivation is already engaged.
I develop the ideas behind these commentaries, and how they connect, here: substack.com/home/post/p-...
What ties all this together is the cultural ecology framework Jean-Baptiste André and Nicolas Baumard have been developing www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Free access for 50 days 🔓 authors.elsevier.com/a/1n3DE4sIRv...
Really happy to have worked on this with Hayley Jach, @thomasbeuchot.bsky.social, Luke Smillie & Nicolas Baumard.
We argue Openness to Experience rests on curiosity and ambiguity tolerance, and is ecologically modulated: it expands under safety and resources, contracts under scarcity.
This connects personality to long-term, ecology-driven cultural change: the rise of fiction, the Scientific Revolution, the expansion of moral concern.
I see it as one piece of a bigger picture: four BBS commentaries on human motivation and culture from the same angle (two still to come, on Manvir Singh's cultural manifold target article and Chater & Christiansen's social tinkering target article).
Edgar Dubourg
Edgar Dubourg
Edgar Dubourg
Edgar Dubourg
New commentary with Nicolas Baumard in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, on Ko & Neuberg's target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
We argue for distinguishing two kinds of ecological input…
