Prof. Gillian Brown
@gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.6K following 300 posts
Professor of psychology; University of St Andrews, UK; gender/sex, evolution, culture; she/her. 🌈 New edition: 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour' (https://tinyurl.com/yfv2kc27) Lab: https://gillianbrown.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
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gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
🚨 New, short article by myself, Clark Barrett and @kevinlala.bsky.social on the legacy of Wilson's 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', which was published 50 years ago.

@science.org #ehbea #histbiol #evobio #psyscisky

Revisiting the human sociobiology debate |Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Revisiting the human sociobiology debate
What have we learned 50 years on?
www.science.org
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
sonjawild.bsky.social
Out today in @plosbiology.org (1/5)

Siblings and non-parental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits 🐦🧩

Link to study:
10.0.5.91/journal.pbio...

Co-authors:
@lucymaplin.bsky.social
@galarconnieto.bsky.social
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
chazfirestone.bsky.social
This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇
Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
ehbea.bsky.social
🚨AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT🚨

EHBEA is calling for SELF-nominations for their New Investigator Award.

If you are doing, or know someone, some really cool research as an early-career researcher please don’t hesitate to apply!

DEADLINE: December 19th, 2025

Here is the form👇
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
EHBEA-2026-New-Investigator-Award-nomination-form.docx
2026 NEW INVESTIGATOR AWARD Self-nomination Form Please submit this application form by e-mail to the EHBEA Secretary [email protected]. Next Deadline: 5pm (GMT), 19th DECEMBER 2026 ...
docs.google.com
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
kohngregory.bsky.social
The problem is that innateness is not a neutral concept. It hinders our understanding of ontogeny by posing as a developmental explanation when it is not. Showing that a behavior is predictable across space and time is informative, but it does not reveal how it developed.
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
behavecolpapers.bsky.social
Intra- and inter-species information transfer aids tropical fish shoals in detecting predators and food sources BES
Intra- and inter-species information transfer aids tropical fish shoals in detecting predators and food sources
Aquatic animals must continuously gather information about their surroundings to cope with the changing conditions of their environment. In the current study we provide insights on information transfer among wild tropical fish schools, within the context of two survival-centric tasks: predator avoidance and detecting food sources. We investigated intra-species information transfer among zebrafish (Danio rerio) shoals and inter-species information transfer from flying barb (Esomus danricus), pool barb (Puntius sophore), or mixed species shoals to zebrafish shoals. Our experiments established that zebrafish shoals exhibited antipredator behaviours upon exposure to olfactory and visual cues from demonstrator shoals (in visual contact with a predator) consisting of zebrafish, flying barbs or mixed species consisting of both species. To gain insight into information transfer on the presence of food sources, we conducted two-choice experiments measuring the association time of test zebrafish with demonstrator shoals possessing or lacking information on the presence of food sources. Interestingly, these experiments revealed that while there was no evidence for information transfer from single species demonstrator shoals, mixed species demonstrator shoals did convey information to the observer test zebrafish. Therefore, our experiments reveal that wild zebrafish obtain information on predators and food sources through visual and/or olfactory cues from conspecific, heterospecific or mixed-species shoals, suggesting that information access may be an important driver towards shoaling among fish.
dlvr.it
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
reidingerve.bsky.social
Do men see gender parity in representation as detrimental to their interests? What about when women’s representation exceeds parity? And how do such shifts affect men’s fairness perceptions? I address these questions in my article, now published in PRQ. 1/9

doi.org/10.1177/1065...
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
ehbea.bsky.social
EHBEA is looking for new PRESIDENT and SECRETARY for 2026-2029! 👀

If you know of anybody who could represent EHBEA, nominate them as president!

If you know with good organisational skills, nominate them as secretary!

DEADLINE: 16/12/2026

HERE IS THE FORM 👇

docs.google.com/document/d/1...
EHBEACommitteeNominationForm_Pres_Sec.doc
EHBEA Committee 2026-2029: Nomination Form The EHBEA Steering Committee is calling for nominations for the following open committee positions for 2026-2029. You are invited to nominate one or more c...
docs.google.com
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
rebeccasear.bsky.social
If one man marries two women, another man must go unmarried, right? No. Demography matters. If sex ratios are skewed towards women, then polygyny can exist alongside universal marriage for men (who want to marry women). If only more people understood demography 😊
gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
Maybe 'Intro to Evolutionary Human Behavioural Sciences'? I think we've tended to put 'evolutionary' before 'human', rather than vice versa, cos they're evolutionary approaches to human sciences not human approaches to evolutionary sciences.😊 Maybe 'social science' wouldn't need 'human'?🤷‍♀️
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
watarutoyokawa.bsky.social
@thecharleywu.bsky.social is giving our second tutorial explaining how we can study complex social behaviour through computational models. As always, code and demo are available in the website! cosmossummerschool.github.io/notebooks/tu...
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
thecharleywu.bsky.social
Key dimensions of social learning problems. @watarutoyokawa.bsky.social giving the first tutorial of #COSMOS2025 As always, course materials are opening available on our website cosmossummerschool.github.io/materials/
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
protzko.bsky.social
Hostile and benevolent sexism are both on the decline in 1,097 studies, N = 339,740 since 1996.

Note that "3" on these scales is already a neutral response. Even bigger progress in countries with more hostile sexism.

From Matthew D. Hammond

psycnet.apa.org/psycarticles...

#phdsky #psych
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
endsexisminschools.bsky.social
We’re launching the results of our research into gender balance in the History curriculum today.

The report - The Great History Heist: Reclaiming Women’s Place in the History Curriculum - found only 12% of History lessons feature women as their main focus. 59% featured no women at all.
Sexism in the History Curriculum - End Sexism in Schools
End Sexism In School’s second crowd research project is looking into the History curriculum taught at KS3 (years 7-9) in England and Wales.
endsexisminschools.org.uk
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
rebeccasear.bsky.social
"Rather than offering a prescriptive checklist, we frame this toolkit as an opening: a step toward anthropological causal inference that integrates transparency, theoretical & methodological coherence, & the epistemological commitments of the biocultural synthesis in human biology & anthropology"
Toward New Directions in Human Biology: A Roadmap for Anthropological Causal Inference With Observational Data
Human biologists seek to understand how cultural, environmental, and biological forces shape observed patterns of human variation. Yet contemporary insights and approaches to observational causal inf...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
lindarrighi.bsky.social
New paper from the Jansen lab at @uniregensburg.bsky.social surprisingly found a positive relationship between stereotype-consistent associations and mental rotation accuracy in preschool girls, highlighting the complexities within this field of research.

Read more at
doi.org/10.3389/fpsy...
Frontiers | No relationship between gender stereotypes and mental rotation in preschool girls
Gender stereotypes about spatial ability have been proposed as a contributing factor to the gender gap in STEM. This goal of this study was to investigate wh...
doi.org
Reposted by Prof. Gillian Brown
lkhayward.bsky.social
Why do males and females often differ in traits?
The expected answer: selection.
But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same