Hugo Mercier
hugoreasoning.bsky.social
Hugo Mercier
@hugoreasoning.bsky.social

Evolutionary and cognitive psychologist. Author, Not Born Yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/yyh929ns), The Enigma of Reason (http://tinyurl.com/6hbpn84).

Psychology 27%
Sociology 17%
New job:

Professor of History

University of Wisconsin - Madison

jobs.h-net.org/jobs/69456

Merci !
Rarement, un livre m'a autant stimulé intellectuellement !

"Pas né de la dernière pluie", d'Hugo Mercier démonte l'idée reçue que les gens seraient majoritairement stupides et les foules crédules.

J'extrais ici trois arguments très pertinents pour défendre son hypothèse. ⤵️
this is an obvious overcorrection that misleads the polling data and will lead to disaster in the Heartland. the results of tonight show that the Democrats should moderate: adopting two or at most three of the five pillars of Islam
if democrats are serious about winning they need to learn from tonight and convert to islam
My first paper, out in PsychReview!!

Along with @orbenamy.bsky.social, Nik & @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social, @realadamhunt.bsky.social & I revisit an old theoretical question using concepts from evo psychiatry and anthro:

Why do mixed associations exist b/w social media & mental health?

A 🧵
I am looking for a post-doc working on behavioral/environmental/urban/energy economics to join my group at the University of Copenhagen. Position is 2 years (possibly 3), good salary, free health insurance, one of the most livable cities in the world. Apply here: jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...
Postdoctoral Position in Behavioral and Environmental Economics
jobportal.ku.dk

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

Does the Danish foreign minister just go around giving everyone culturally appropriate lego sets? That has to be the best job.
Anyway, we need some joy, so here's the Egyptian foreign minister being given a Lego Pyramid by the Danish foreign minister.
Great investigation of the Nazis, racists and criminals mobilising the flag-on-lamp-posts movement. This is the kind of journalism that the national media could and should have conducted:

manchestermill.co.uk/the-men-who-...
"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be
predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."
The (In)Effectiveness of Psychological Targeting: A Meta‐Analytic Review
The use of psychological targeting—employing machine learning to predict consumer personality from digital footprints and subsequently tailoring persuasive messages—has emerged as a controversial yet...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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!
Unearthing the Nature of Knowing
Research reveals how people process information, how they acquire—and sometimes reject—knowledge, and how that compares to artificial intelligence systems’ abilities to do the same.
www.psychologicalscience.org
The NY Times and WaPo may be lost causes but holy shite look at PEOPLE out here absolutely killing it with 100% unvarnished truths 🌟
Mindscape 333 | Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them. #MindscapePodcast

www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...
You know what day should be a national holiday in 2029?

THE DAY OF THE COMPLETE AND TOTAL BULLDOZING OF THE PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP BALLROOM.
That’s no ballroom…

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/
Cognitive Science Graduate Admissions – Information about graduate admissions from the cognitive science faculty
sites.dartmouth.edu
I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social.

We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.

tiu.nu/22989
1/
Alright, this one’s been sitting in my drawer for a year now, after @mcxfrank.bsky.social and I got turned down for a public commentary.
But before I forget about it completely, here’s the preprint:
Can we harvest insights for rice theory from two state farms in China?

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

Inspiring. Danish government announces additional 2.5 billion euro investment in science and research.

Hopefully politicians in the Netherlands pay are paying attention.

#tk2025 #research #science

ufm.dk/aktuelt/pres...
I et nybrud med dansk forskningspolitik vil regeringen gennemføre flerårige investeringer i forskning og innovation på over 19 mia. kr.
Regeringen vil styrke Danmarks forskning inden for områder som sikkerhed, sundhed og klima og samtidig skabe bedre betingelser for både den risikovillige topforskning, der danner grundlaget for fremti...
ufm.dk
Elle fait partie des familles des victimes de l'attentat du DC10 d'UTA de 1989, imputable au pouvoir libyen du colonel Kadhafi.
Elle a des choses à nous dire sur Sarkozy et sa victimisation.
A écouter jusqu'à la fin.
Published today: One of the biggest #science #communication studies to date. We asked 71,922 people in 68 countries how they #engage with information about #science and combined the data with several country-level factors: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #OpenAccess
Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏
ERC funded PhD position on Cultural Evolution
ERC funded PhD position on Cultural Evolution posted on October 16, 2025 We are currently seeking a highly motivated individual for a ful...
hmc-lab.com

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

I guarantee you that more than half the lunatics yelling about opsec in response to this post have published something on a public social media site that, according to their own standards, should get them disappeared.
Take a picture of yourself at the No Kings rally.

Print it.

Put it in a frame.

Your grandchildren will speak about you for generations to come. You took a stand against fascism. You stood up for democracy. 
Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

Nice to see our research featured on the eHRAF Academic Quarterly!

I also discovered some interesting papers that I missed :)
Tolkein continues to resonate. The new bank being set up by Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel is named Erebor after the “lonely mountain” in The Hobbit. This was also an interesting line in this rpt on the new bank by @tabbykinder.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/202d...

Reposted by Hugo Mercier

In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...
Redirecting
doi.org
I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Total solar eclipse triggers dawn behavior in birds: Insights from acoustic recordings and community science
On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse disrupted light-dark cycles for North American birds during the lead-up to spring reproduction. Compiling more than 10,000 community observations and artificial ...
www.science.org
The global whaling industry experienced a boom c. 1840-1950 as technology allowed whalers to hunt the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

Under standard models, we would have expected krill populations to have *exploded*.

Instead, they DROPPED exponentially.

Let's talk about the KRILL PARADOX.