Nicolas Baumard
Biographic Data
| ID | 866279 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicolas Baumard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicolas |
| FAMILY NAME | Baumard |
| SIGNATURE | BAUMARD N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1439-9150 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Changing models in cultural evolution: From (quasi-)Darwinian to ecological mechanisms: A commentary on ‘Quasi-Darwinian mechanisms: ecological inheritance and cumulative culture’ by Kim Sterelny
Kim Sterelny’s analysis of cultural learning moves cultural evolution theory away from Darwinian models toward cognition, ecological scaffolding and incentives. We argue his insights warrant a more radical conclusion: cultural evolution needs no Darwinian vocabulary, even in its ‘quasi-Darwinian’ form. Cultural stability and change are better understood as repeated phenotypic constructions triggered by the passive ecological legacies left by prev…
Evolved psychology, eco-phenotypic feedbacks and the social construction of culture
Perceived Waist-to-Hip Ratio Predicts Attractiveness, Age, and Parity Judgments in Pre-Contemporary European Portraits of Clothed Women
Women with a lower waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) are consistently judged as more attractive, a finding replicated across diverse populations and methods. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference may reflect selection for cues of female reproductive potential, as WHR reliably tracks both age and parity. However, virtually all previous studies present nude or minimally clothed bodies in highly standardized conditions, leaving open whether WHR-b…
Charting the rise of imaginary worlds in history
Fictions with imaginary worlds such as Star Wars , Harry Potter , Game of Thrones or One Piece are achieving global success in industrialized societies. This paper investigates the historical trajectory and psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon. Study 1 ( N = 51,169 novels and 50,928 movies) documents a clear increase in the prevalence and centrality of imaginary worlds from antiquity to the modern era. Study 2 demonstrates a historical …
Literary Fiction Indicates Early Modernization in China Prior to Western Influence
Modernization refers to the shift from traditional values to individual autonomy and self-development, driven by economic development. Previously considered unique to Western culture, modernization has now emerged as a global phenomenon, with East Asia playing a leading role. This article explores the possibility that modernization might have occurred outside the Western world prior to Western influence. We pioneered a novel approach for understa…
The ecological approach to culture
Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction
We present a comprehensive analysis of the rise of fictions across human narratives, using large-scale datasets that collectively span over 65,000 works across various media (movies, literary works), cultures (over 30 countries, Western and non-Western), and time periods (2000 BCE to 2020 CE). We measured fictiveness – defined as the degree of departure from reality – across three narrative dimensions: protagonists, events, and settings. We used …
Reproductive Strategies and Romantic Love in Early Modern Europe
In Western Europe, the Early Modern Period is characterized by the rise of tenderness in romantic relationships and the emergence of companionate marriage. Despite a long research tradition, the origins of these social changes remain elusive. In this paper, we build on recent advances in behavioral sciences, showing that romantic emotional investment, which is more culturally variable than sexual attraction, enhances the cohesion of long-term rel…
The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories
Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these…
Household Wealth is Associated With Perceived Trustworthiness in a Diverse Set of Countries
Interpersonal trust impacts societal and individual outcomes, affecting economic growth, democracy, and well-being. Trust levels vary both within and across countries, raising the question of what factors influence interpersonal trust. Existing research indicates that an individual’s socioeconomic status influences their level of trust, with wealthier individuals tending to be more trusting. This article examines a further effect of wealth on int…
The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences
Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndro…
The psychological origins of science fiction
Reciprocal contracts—not competitive acquisition—explain the moral psychology of ownership
We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about the calculation of mutually beneficial, reciprocal contracts
Perceptions of income shape interpersonal trust in a set of diverse countries
People make many inferences based on cues of wealth. These inferences regarding the character and behavior of others have real-life consequences, for example, social distancing from individuals at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. In this cross-cultural study, we investigate the association between perceived wealth and perceived trustworthiness. In studies 1 and 2, we first investigated people’s ability to detect wealth from pictures …
The puritanical moral contract: Purity, cooperation, and the architecture of the moral mind
Commentators raise fundamental questions about the notion of purity (sect. R1), the architecture of moral cognition (sect. R2), the functional relationship between morality and cooperation (sect. R3), the role of folk-theories of self-control in moral judgement (sect. R4), and the cultural variation of morality (sect. R5). In our response, we address all these issues by clarifying our theory of puritanism, responding to counter-arguments, and inc…
A Step-By-Step Method for Cultural Annotation by LLMs
Building on the growing body of research highlighting the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), this paper presents a structured pipeline for the annotation of cultural (big) data through such Large Language Models (LLMs), offering a detailed methodology for leveraging GPT’s advanced computational abilities. Our approach provides researchers across various fields with a method for efficient a…
Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing
Why do humans believe in moralizing gods? Leading accounts argue that these beliefs evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that beliefs in moralizing gods are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve t…
The gene’s-eye view of culture: Vehicles, not replicators
The social leverage effect: Institutions transform weak reputation effects into strong incentives for cooperation
Institutions allow cooperation to persist when reciprocity and reputation provide insufficient incentives. Yet how they do so remains unclear, especially given that institutions are themselves a form of cooperation. To solve this puzzle, we develop a mathematical model of reputation-based cooperation in which two social dilemmas are nested within one another. The first dilemma, characterized by high individual costs or insufficient monitoring, ca…
From supernatural punishment to big gods to puritanical religions: Clarifying explanatory targets in the rise of moralizing religions
International audience
Quantifying the scientific revolution
The Scientific Revolution represents a turning point in the history of humanity. Yet it remains ill-understood, partly because of a lack of quantification. Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies ( N = 22,943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300–1850). Our data reveal striking differences across countries, with England and the United Provinces being muc…
Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint
Standard approaches to cultural evolution focus on the recipients or consumers. This does not take into account the fitness costs incurred in producing the behaviours or artefacts that become cultural, i.e. widespread in a social group. We argue that cultural evolution models should focus on these fitness costs and benefits of cultural production, particularly in the domain of 'symbolic' culture. In this approach, cultural products can be conside…
Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation
Optimal resource allocation and its consequences on behavioral strategies, personality traits and preferences
Life history theory is increasingly invoked in psychology as a framework for understanding differences in individual preferences. In particular, evolutionary human scientists tend to assume that, along with reproductive strategies, several behavioral traits such as cooperation and risk-taking and, in its broadest version, a range of psychological and personality traits also cluster into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ life histories. However, the inclusion of …
Harmless bodily pleasures are moralized because they are perceived as reducing self-control and cooperativeness
Why do many people moralize harmless bodily pleasures, such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol? In three pre-registered experiments (N > 1,600), we investigated whether this is because they perceive bodily pleasures as indirectly facilitating antisocial behaviors by altering self-control. In Study 1 and 2, participants judged that targets who increased (vs. decreased) their indulgence harmless sex, food, alcohol, and laziness had bec…
Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods
Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same…
The ecological approach to culture
What Goes Around Comes Around: The Evolutionary Roots of the Belief in Immanent Justice
The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a…
Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint
Standard approaches to cultural evolution focus on the recipients or consumers. This does not take into account the fitness costs incurred in producing the behaviours or artefacts that become cultural, i.e. widespread in a social group. We argue that cultural evolution models should focus on these fitness costs and benefits of cultural production, particularly in the domain of 'symbolic' culture. In this approach, cultural products can be conside…
The cultural evolution of love in literary history
Early Life Adversity Is Associated With Diminished Social Trust in Adults
Social trust is at the center of democratic societies, but it varies considerably between individuals and cultures. Socioeconomic status has been identified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effects of harsh conditions experienced during childhood on social trust assessed decades later. Here, we…
Cultural evolution by capital accumulation
In this article, we model cultural knowledge as a capital in which individuals invest at a cost. To this end, following other models of cultural evolution, we explicitly consider the investments made by individuals in culture as life history decisions. Our aim is to understand what then determines the dynamics of cultural accumulation. We show that culture can accumulate provided it improves the efficiency of people's lives in such a way as to in…
Punishment is not a group adaptation: Humans punish to restore fairness rather than to support group cooperation
The Needs of the Many Do Not Outweigh the Needs of the Few: The Limits of Individual Sacrifice across Diverse Cultures
A long tradition of research in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries has investigated how people weigh individual welfare versus group welfare in their moral judgments. Relatively less research has investigated the generalizability of results across non- WEIRD populations. In the current study, we ask participants across nine diverse cultures (Bali, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Japan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Serbi…
Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children
Fairness has been identified as a psychological adaptation to share the benefits of cooperation: unfair agents disproportionately favoring their own interests indeed decrease their chance of being recruited in future collaborations. Given the potential benefits of cooperation, it has been argued that fairness should become functional early in ontogeny as the child acquires more independence and expands her social network and collaborations. More …
La morale
Plus encore que la diversité des pratiques et des croyances d’une société à l’autre, c’est la diversité des valeurs morales qui jadis rendait si fascinants les récits des voyageurs et qui, dans le monde de confrontations interculturelles où nous vivons aujourd’hui, rend si pertinente l’anthropologie. La dimension morale est omniprésente, et dans la vie sociale, et dans les travaux qui la décrivent. Paradoxalement, cette omniprésence rend la moral…
La morale n'est pas le social: Le point de vue de la psychologie
Cet article s'appuie sur une synthèse des recherches contemporaines en psychologie pour montrer que les normes morales ne se confondent pas avec les normes sociales. Les situations morales - situations dans lesquelles l'intérêt individuel et l'intérêt collectif s'opposent - présentent un problème spécifique. À la différence des primates qui ne semblent pas coopérer entre eux, les humains ont résolu ce problème non pas par l'altruisme mais en s'ai…
La morale
Plus encore que la diversité des pratiques et des croyances d’une société à l’autre, c’est la diversité des valeurs morales qui jadis rendait si fascinants les récits des voyageurs et qui, dans le monde de confrontations interculturelles où nous vivons aujourd’hui, rend si pertinente l’anthropologie. La dimension morale est omniprésente, et dans la vie sociale, et dans les travaux qui la décrivent. Paradoxalement, cette omniprésence rend la moral…
La morale n'est pas le social: Le point de vue de la psychologie
Cet article s'appuie sur une synthèse des recherches contemporaines en psychologie pour montrer que les normes morales ne se confondent pas avec les normes sociales. Les situations morales - situations dans lesquelles l'intérêt individuel et l'intérêt collectif s'opposent - présentent un problème spécifique. À la différence des primates qui ne semblent pas coopérer entre eux, les humains ont résolu ce problème non pas par l'altruisme mais en s'ai…
Has punishment played a role in the evolution of cooperation? A critical review
Punishment is not a group adaptation: Humans punish to restore fairness rather than to support group cooperation
La morale est-elle fondée sur la compassion
Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective
From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co‐operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from a…
Networking Past and Present
A special feature in the Social Evolution Forum with R.I.M. Dunbar as the author of the focus article. Commentaries by Nicolas Baumard, Marcus J. Hamilton, Paul Hooper, Daniel N. Finkel, and Herbert Gintis
What Goes Around Comes Around: The Evolutionary Roots of the Belief in Immanent Justice
The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a…
Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods
Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same…
Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children
Fairness has been identified as a psychological adaptation to share the benefits of cooperation: unfair agents disproportionately favoring their own interests indeed decrease their chance of being recruited in future collaborations. Given the potential benefits of cooperation, it has been argued that fairness should become functional early in ontogeny as the child acquires more independence and expands her social network and collaborations. More …
Morale et réputation dans une perspective évolutionniste
Pourquoi les êtres humains se comportent-ils de manière morale ? Les théories évolutionnistes de la morale se partagent habituellement en deux camps, le camp altruiste selon lequel la morale a évolué pour le bien du groupe et dispose les individus à se sacrifier pour la collectivité, et le camp mutualiste selon lequel la morale a été sélectionnée parce qu’elle dispose les individus à respecter les intérêts des autres et ainsi à coopérer avec eux …
Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Empirical problems with the notion of “Big Gods” and of prosociality in large societies
Ara Norenzayan's book and this precis weave together various strands of evidence and modeling into an impressive narrative or causal explanation for the appearance of both “Big Gods” and large-scal
Models of the evolution of fairness in the ultimatum game: A review and classification
Childhood harshness predicts long-lasting leader preferences
Childhood environmental harshness predicts coordinated health and reproductive strategies: A cross-sectional study of a nationally representative sample from France
Cooperation
Cooperation is defined as any action that benefits others at a cost to the actor. Ethnographic and experimental research has shown that human cooperation is both universal and highly variable. This entry presents recent advances in the study of cooperation. It begins with a description of the experimental method used to study cooperation. It then explains the two kinds of evolutionary theories of cooperation (individual and group selection). Fina…
The Needs of the Many Do Not Outweigh the Needs of the Few: The Limits of Individual Sacrifice across Diverse Cultures
A long tradition of research in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries has investigated how people weigh individual welfare versus group welfare in their moral judgments. Relatively less research has investigated the generalizability of results across non- WEIRD populations. In the current study, we ask participants across nine diverse cultures (Bali, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Japan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Serbi…
Quantifying the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution is one of the most important phenomena in human history. Yet it is ill understood, partly because of a lack of quantification. Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies to build national estimates of scientific production during the early modern period. While aggregate levels of national production are unsurprising, per capita estimates reveal striking differences across countries, with the two richest c…
Predictive multivariate modelling of religiosity, prosociality and moralizing in 295,000 individuals from European and non-European populations
Why do moral religions exist? An influential explanation is that religious beliefs in supernatural punishment is cultural group adaptation enhancing prosocial attitudes and thereby large-scale cooperation. An alternative explanation is that religiosity is an individual strategy that results from high level of mistrust and the need for individuals to control others’ behaviours through moralizing. Existing evidence is mixed but most works are limit…
Risk-seeking or impatient? Disentangling variance and time in hazardous behaviors
Individual observations of risky behaviors present a paradox: individuals who take the most risks in terms of hazards (smoking, speeding, risky sexual behaviors) are also less likely to take risks when it comes to innovation, financial risks or entrepreneurship. Existing theories of risk-preferences do not explain these patterns. From a simple model, we argue that many decisions involving risk have a temporal dimension, and that this dimension is…
Early life adversity is associated with diminished social trust in adults
Social trust is at the center of democratic societies but it varies considerably between individuals and societies, which deeply affects a range of prosocial behaviours. Socioeconomic status has been iden- tified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effects of harsh conditions experienced during ch…
Cultural evolution by capital accumulation
In this article, we model cultural knowledge as a capital in which individuals invest at a cost. To this end, following other models of cultural evolution, we explicitly consider the investments made by individuals in culture as life history decisions. Our aim is to understand what then determines the dynamics of cultural accumulation. We show that culture can accumulate provided it improves the efficiency of people's lives in such a way as to in…
L’origine des fictions: L’hypothèse des fonctions évolutionnaires sociales
Nous présentons l’hypothèse des fonctions évolutionnaires sociales de la fiction. Après avoir présenté le cadre théorique dans lequel nous nous inscrivons, et la littérature existante sur cette question, nous décrivons les activités de produire et de consommer des fictions comme des activités intrinsèquement sociales. Les fictions exploitent très finement nos mécanismes cognitifs et les préférences sélectionnées au cours de l’évolution de notre e…
The intertwined cultural evolution of ascetic spiritualities and puritanical religions as technologies of self-discipline
Why do, across ascetic spiritual traditions (e.g. Ancient Greek spiritualities, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism), a moralizing side restricting bodily pleasures, and a joyful side celebrating self-control derived well-being develop in concert? Why are these two intertwined cultural traits a recent development in human history, characteristic of economically developed, socially complex societies of the "Axial" tra…
Psychology (42 works) · Social Psychology (34 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (33 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (23 works) · Economics (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (14 works)