What happens next? Will you fund the winner?

@davidwengrow.bsky.social’s talk was so packed at the Brain Bar today was so packed I literally couldn’t fit through the door - I had to pull some special favors to enter from backstage

But it gets more nuanced over time...

Just out in PNAS!
Our new study finds that a pregame ritual created stronger emotional synchrony among football fans than the game itself.
@uconnresearch.bsky.social
Read: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#Science #Rituals #Emotion #Football #CollectiveBehavior

Who needs fancy R packages for graphs, when you can plot them in the sand? Many thanks to @martinlangcz.bsky.social for teaching today's class at our field school in Mauritius

Today, the UK has decided to comply with international law and hand the last British colony in Africa, the Chagos islands, back to Mauritius. On this historic occasion, we were honored to meet with the Chagossian community and share their excitement and hope for a better future.

bringing the lab into the field...
@uconnresearch.bsky.social

The more discomfort people experienced, the more they gave to an ingroup (Catholic) charity compared to a neutral one (Red Cross). and this effect was stronger for locals, and those identifying more strongly as Catholics.

As 250,000 gathered in the Vatican to pay their respects, they had to endure queues of up to 8 hours under the hot sun, with limited access to shade, rest, water, and sanitation. After assessing how much discomfort they experienced, we looked at charitable giving to two causes

Check out our new pre-print, reporting findings that the cost of attending Pope Francis's funeral predicts parochial altruism, supporting theories of self-signaling osf.io/preprints/os...

Testing wearable equipment by dancing at the Experimental Anthropology Lab. Who said science is not fun?

Our lab is featured in several parts of the latest National Geographic special issue on religion. Here, our grad student, Sevgi Demiroglu, talks about her fieldwork in Toraja, Indonesia
@uconnresearch.bsky.social
@uconn.bsky.social

I asked Chat GPT: "based on what you know about me make an image about what you think my life looks like". I think our concerns about AI taking over may have been exaggerated...

How do people band together in the face of disaster? See our latest paper in Nature Scientific Reports, led by our graduate student Sevgi Demiroglu!
shorturl.at/boQ3d
@uconnresearch.bsky.social

On my long commute, I listen to a lot of non-fiction. Here are some of my favorites from 2024: shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/...

Our paper on emotional contagion in a collective ritual is now officially out in the American Journal of Human Biology. Using wearable GPS and electrodermal activity monitors, we track the spread of emotional arousal in the context of a religious procession.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Come join us in Mauritius this summer for the Interdisciplinary Ethnography field school!
anthropology.uconn.edu/2023/01/10/s...

Very pleased to see this review of my book #RITUAL by Denise Winn!
www.hgi.org.uk/resources/de...