The Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), in close collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Cognitive Science.

SBS is an interdisciplinary department bringing together psychology, economics, evolutionary anthropology and biology, political science, and sociology. Our research addresses the psychological foundations of social life: how people learn and transmit cultural knowledge, how they cooperate and make moral decisions, and how they judge, trust, and delegate to artificial intelligence.

We are searching broadly and welcome candidates whose research focuses on learning, decision-making, social cognition, or collective behavior. Applicants should hold (or expect to complete by August 2027) a PhD in psychology (any subfield, including social, cognitive, cross-cultural, developmental, and evolutionary), cognitive science, or a related field. We particularly value expertise in quantitative methods and an interest in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Practical details:

• Start date: September 1, 2027
• Teaching in English; French fluency is not required
• Reduced teaching load, research budget, and relocation and integration support
• Application materials (in English): CV, cover letter, research statement, and three letters of reference
• Deadline: December 15, 2026

Full details and application: https://www.tse-fr.eu/tenure-track-positions

“The Sorcerer”, sketch based on Henri Breuil’s original drawing of art in the Trois-Frères cave, France.

– by Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny

People in many traditional societies around the world respond to sickness, death, and a range of other serious misfortunes in a strange and strangely uniform way: they regard these events as ultimately caused by the occult agency of other humans. Moreover, this view is not just backward-looking; people actively fear occult attacks, and take countermeasures to avoid them. We call this psychological tendency “the agential view of misfortune”. Its wide occurrence is puzzling not just because the view is false, but also because the view is costly: socially, economically, and—one can only assume—psychologically. Michelle Stephenson (2022) provides a striking description of the view among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea: “People seem almost obsessed by fears of harmful magic being used against them and no death or serious mishap occurs which is not attributed to the sorcerer’s powers. Villagers themselves say that they are preoccupied with such fears and that consequently they tend to be highly suspicious of each other’s motives, even of close relatives” (p. 129).

We take up this puzzle in our article, Rise of the dark shaman: A path from healers to sorcerers (2026). Our starting point is the inadequacy of existing explanations. The biggest problem, as we see it, is that none offers a plausible account of how the agential view of misfortune might establish in the first place. Once the view is established, its persistence is not mysterious. Acceptance by the parental generation strongly disposes acceptance by the next generation. The seriousness with which the parental generation takes the threat, and the costs they accept to reduce it testify to their real conviction. This is especially true to the extent that the local version of the view is enmeshed into the broader worldview of the culture—which it typically is. A person who questions the status quo may make themselves a target (indeed, they may be suspected of sorcery); at best, they will seem somewhat socially deviant. Moreover, accusations of sorcery and witchcraft are available as ready-made “social moves” for people to play against each other. Where and when people can deploy such accusations to improve or protect their social standing or that of their allies, we should expect they will do so.

We argue that the agential view of misfortune has its roots in shamanism (itself widespread). The prototypical shaman is someone who (i) is understood by others as possessing unique talents and skills for interacting with a supernatural world distinct from this one. (ii) They can obtain information no one else can, including knowledge of future events. (iii) Moreover, shaman are able to directly act in the spirit world on behalf of others; for example, they may locate and return the spirit of a sick person. But because they can act on behalf of others, they can act on their own behalf as well. They are players of in a dangerous game. (iv) To enter this world, shaman often subject themselves to excruciating physical rituals—often in the public eye—which may be supplemented by mind-altering drugs where available. They are the original “psychonauts”.

Shamanism primes the agential view of misfortune in two main ways. First, shamans constitute “living proof” of the possibility of sorcerers—of “dark shamans”. If they can wield their powers for good, it stands to reason they—or at least a counterpart—can wield them for evil. Many ethnographic accounts attest to group members’ impression that shaman are “morally ambiguous” in this sense. The second way is that shamans themselves stoke fear over sorcerous threats. As acknowledged occult specialists, shamans have an outsized role in shaping the occult lore and practices the next generation encounters, and by continuing to make the threat of sorcery salient to others, they ensure their ongoing place of social prominence in group life. Ethnography again shows that shamans (and similar occult specialists) enjoy prestige translating into benefits on the ground (e.g., being excused from normal social duties, having increased power in group decision-making). It is also common for shamans to receive direct compensation for services rendered (e.g., divination ceremonies). In some communities, these occult specialists also play forensic roles, revealing the source of occult attacks, and this too gives them social leverage.

We do not claim that shamans consciously “big up” themselves. Rather, we see the operation of a well-known and studied cognitive bias at work here—namely, the “myside bias”. Shamans have an implicit, unconscious tendency to bias the flow of information about the occult in ways that support and extend their importance. Our hypothesis is that this myside bias, operating cumulatively over cultural-historical time, leads to an elaboration of lore emphasizing the threat of harmful magic, and the shaman as defender and protector.

Our other main task in our article is to offer an account of how shamanism itself can establish. The core ideas we develop are these: (i) following an ingenious insight of 19th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, we suggest that dreams and hallucinatory visions psychologically dispose people towards belief in immaterial spirits and a spirit realm. (ii) Once language evolved, these phenomenological raw materials were channeled into culturally shared views about spirits and the spirt world—in other words, a version of an animistic worldview was established. (iii) Proto-shamans were recognizable within this animistic milieu as individuals as who were especially willing to work with conscious-altering techniques that had already come to be associated with the spirit world, who were less risk-averse, and who were perhaps more prone to respond to these techniques.

The final step here is to explain how individuals claiming supernatural skills and talents for themselves gain credibility in the eyes of the broader group. We canvass a range of options in our article, but at an abstract level, we think cognitive biases are again crucial—especially our susceptibility to causal illusions. We are apt to turn noticed associations, and even the appearance of associations, into causal beliefs. When a highly salient event precedes a second, unusual or unexpected event, (an intense trance-inducing ceremony followed by the death of an enemy) humans are apt to conclude that the first caused the second. On our account, these biases play a dual role: they both work to convince proto-shamans of their powers while also convincing others of the efficacy of the displays and treatments these individuals put on.

These two parts of our argument—the development of the agential view of misfortune out of shamanism and the origins of shamanism itself—could be separated. In particular, one could couple the first to an alternative account of the latter. What we most want to insist on is that shamanism, however evolved, has a special role to play in midwifing the agential view of misfortune. Unlike belief in the omnipresent danger of others’ harmful magic, which is undeniably costly, belief in shamanism is plausibly beneficial to the broader group (if only for its placebo effect), or at the very least benign. Shamans did not displace more effective medical practitioners. This makes the task of explaining the origins of shamanism much easier.

Boiled down, what we propose is a (cultural) evolutionary model of belief in sorcery, witchcraft and allied phenomena in three main stages: first comes animism, then comes shamanism, then comes the agential view of misfortune.

For now, all we can claim to be in possession of is a “how plausibly” model. We take this to be progress, given the puzzling nature of the agential view of misfortune, together with the failure of previous explanations to deal with the unique challenge of the view’s origins. To convert our model into a “how actually” model will require testing, and we conclude our article with a number of predictions for future research. Stay tuned.

Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny. Rise of the dark shaman: a path from healers to sorcery. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106912.

References

Stephen, M. (2022). Sorcery, magic and the Mekeo world view. In N.C. Habel (Ed.), Power, plumes and piglets, Australian Association for the Study of Religions Book Series, pp. 149-160.

– by Erik K. Fonn

One important aspect of our social world is that we have intuitions that specific people have stronger claims to specific objects. We often refer to this as ownership. Getting this right is likely adaptively important: Taking the wrong things might be dangerous, and people might start to dislike you for it. But getting ownership right is in principle also difficult because these intuitions often bear on things that happened in the past: that is, how and by whom something was acquired. For instance, whether a person took an object by force or bought it likely matters for our intuitions about whether the object belongs to that person. But past events like these are often unavailable to us. So how are we able to form intuitions about who owns what?

Many studies suggest that humans, at least from early childhood onwards, rely on some mental shortcuts in order to make these ownership ascriptions. One such shortcut is prior possession. Simply put, this is the rule that whoever apparently had a resource first gets to keep it. And there are good evolutionary reasons that this is so. For instance, a person buying a house might start furnishing it according to their specific needs and preferences, making the house more valuable to themselves but not necessarily more valuable to everyone else. In this case, the house owner would tend to be more willing to defend their house than others are willing to fight to take it, and this general pattern has been documented across a range of animal species. Moreover, because losing possessions to others is costly, people might avoid those who do not respect prior possession and choose others as social and cooperative partners. Among humans, being a part of a social group and reaping the benefits of cooperation is indeed important to survive and thrive.

However, very little is known about how this prior possession rule actually emerges in human development: Is it something we learn from experience, or does it perhaps depend on cultural norms? Another possibility, which we sought to test, is that the prior possession rule is present in infants before they have had extensive experience with conflicts and before they have learned much about the world through socialization. In other words, the prior possession rule might serve as a backbone of human social understanding helping us to make sense of and navigate the social world from earliest childhood. Indeed, previous research suggests that infants have a very sophisticated understanding of the social world: Long before they can talk, infants distinguish agents from objects, predict who will win conflicts, and figure out who belongs to which group. Do infants, then, use prior possession to make sense of their social surroundings?

We approached this question in two ways: First, we asked whether infants avoid those who take, or attempt to take, things from others. Second, we asked whether infants expect those who hold prior possession to retain this possession when challenged. In order to address the first question, we showed 10–13-month-olds live puppet shows of one puppet possessing a toy box and another who did not. Subsequently, the one who did not have a toy box challenged the other. We varied across participants whether the one who held first possession lost the object, retained it, or whether the conflict was left unresolved. Finally, we tested whether infants preferred either of the two agents: They were presented with the two puppets on a tray and were allowed to choose between them. Across all the experimental conditions, infants were just as likely to choose the prior possessor as the contender. In other words, infants did not appear to avoid those who violate first possession.

Although infants did not systematically evaluate these social scenarios, they may in principle still have expectations that first possessors will win. Across two experiments we showed infants aged 10–18 months videos of a prior possessor (standing in the middle of an enclosure) being challenged by a contender. Infants saw both outcomes: either the prior possessor won the enclosure, or the contender did. If infants expect prior possessors to win, they should be surprised and look longer at the videos where the contender wins the territory. However, across both experiments, we found no evidence that they did. Yet, infants were able to understand the conflict: When we changed the size of the agents, so that one agent was much bigger than the other, infants expected the larger individual to win. In other words, infants were able to understand what was going on in the videos, but they did not care about who held prior possession.

These results did not align with our hypothesis that infants would use prior possession to make sense of their social world. Specifically, while prior research suggests that infants are able to track possession history in certain ways, for example distinguishing giving from taking, our results suggest that infants do not yet have the intuition that prior possessors have a stronger claim.

Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: We do not know if infants lack these capacities altogether, or whether we used the wrong methods to detect them. On the other hand, we found no effects of prior possession across two different measures, and infants did use physical size to predict who would win. This suggests that our methods were suitable to test infants’ conflict expectations, but that these expectations were not guided by prior possession alone. This asymmetry is puzzling: Predicting conflict outcomes from both size and prior possession would plausibly serve the same adaptive function: predicting who will win a conflict and so avoiding costly fights not worth having. Yet only physical size seems to guide infants’ conflict predictions. Whether and how infants come to use possession history to anticipate conflict outcomes still remains a question for future research.

Erik K. Fonn, Joakim H. Zahl, Bjørn D. Kristensen, Oliver Scott Curry, and Lotte Thomsen. Infants use physical size, but not prior possession, to predict conflict outcomes, and do not prefer prior possessors over contenders. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106952.

– by Joon Hwang

Imagine you have two options: get $50 for sure or take a 50-50 chance of getting $100 or nothing. Both options have the same expected payoff ($50), but one might appeal to you more than the other. If you prefer to take that chance, you might be a risk-taker; if you prefer the guaranteed $50, you might be risk averse. You will notice that researchers use “risk” here to describe how much the possible payoffs vary, rather than harm or loss itself.

Now let’s add one more detail: you can count on family, friends, or neighbors to help you if you choose the risky option and get nothing. Would that make you more willing to take the risk? This is the question we examined in our recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior. People have had to make decisions under risk throughout human history. Our ancestors could spend a day pursuing a large animal and return with plenty of meat or nothing at all. Today, someone might leave a steady job to start a business, hoping to earn more but knowing they could earn less or lose money.

Such unpredictability in everyday life is also closely linked to the evolution of human cooperation, particularly resource sharing. By sharing resources with others – giving when they have more and receiving when they have less – people can make their access to resources more reliable. The idea that sharing reduces variability of an outcome in this way has been widely studied under the “risk-reduction reciprocity” model of human cooperation. But in this study, we examined the decision itself. Having support to fall back on might do more than help you recover from a bad outcome. It might make you more willing to take a risk in the first place!

We worked with 140 adults from 82 households in Matlab, Bangladesh. In this rural area, farming and fishing, once the main sources of livelihood, have declined, while people’s dependence on markets and cash income has grown. The growing need for cash has made informal lending networks more important, while people continue to share food and household items with relatives and neighbors. We asked participants whom their households could borrow money (2,000 Bangladesh taka (BDT); about 21 USD), food, or household items from and whom they would lend to. From their answers, we mapped two social networks, with connections between households representing moneylending in one and the sharing of food and household items in the other. We also measured their willingness to take risks by asking them to choose between a guaranteed 50 BDT (about 0.52 USD) and a chance of getting 100 BDT (about 1.05 USD) or nothing, with the odds varying across rounds (see the figure below).

We found that different forms of social support were linked to greater or lower willingness to take risks, depending on the type of support and how people were connected. Participants were more willing to take risks when their households were part of tightly connected moneylending networks. This pattern is called “clustering”: the people you are connected to are also connected to one another. In moneylending networks, this could keep money circulating within a cluster. For example, money you lend to one household may later reach another household that can help you when you need it. Having financial support ties within this tightly connected cluster could help you cover a large expense or recover from a business loss. As a result, people may be more willing to take risks when they have reliable financial support to fall back on.

In contrast, participants who could turn to more households for food and household items were less willing to take risks. We had expected this support to encourage risk-taking too, but food and household items are worth less than cash loans and may not provide enough of a buffer against large losses. Instead, this support may act as informal insurance, helping people meet their everyday needs so they do not have to take risks out of desperation.

Although our results do not establish causal relationships, they help us consider how the social connections around us and the resources available through them might provide cues for responding flexibly to uncertainty. These cues may make a risky choice easier to afford (e.g., financial clustering) or reduce the need to take that risk at all (e.g., sharing food or household items). Seen this way, human systems for risk management may have evolved within networks of cooperation, where the structure of relationships shaped not only how resources were distributed to reduce variability in outcomes, but also how people made decisions under risk in the first place.

Should we worry, then, that helping people recover from losses might encourage them to take risks recklessly, a problem known as “moral hazard”? We suggest looking at it another way: innovation also involves risk, whether someone is trying a new farming method or starting a business. People may be more willing to try a new idea if others in their social networks can help cover the costs of failure, while the prospect of sharing in the gains through social networks may give those people a reason to offer that help. Thus, innovations we often credit to individual ingenuity may owe their success to the social environment that lets people take risks and recover from failed attempts. If so, we may also want to reconsider how the gains from successful innovations are shared, both to recognize that collective contribution and to sustain the cooperation that supports future innovation.

Joon Hwang, Nurul Alam, and Mary K. Shenk. Social capital is associated with both risk-taking and risk-avoidance in rural Bangladesh. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106923.