Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N.S. Effects of experience and social context on prospective caching strategies by scrub jays. Nature (2001) Are complex social behaviours – that many of us may think of as specific to humans – observed in animals that we normally would not think of as smart? To answer this question, Emery […]

What happens in our brain when we look at attractive and ugly faces?

by Ali Shiravand Dynamic norms promote sustainable behaviour, even if it is counternormative Gregg Sparkman & Gregory M Walton. Psychological Science 2017 Telling someone that “Lots of people do X” sometimes persuades them to do the same. This paper shows that saying “More and more people are doing X” is an even stronger persuader even when doing […]

Talking to others changes our opinion in very interesting and non-trivial ways.

Human children but not chimpanzees make irrational decisions driven by social comparison Esther Herrmann, Lou M. Haux, Henriette Zeidler and Jan M. Engelmann January 2019  https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2228 The paper asks if Social Comparison can motivate primates to make stupid value-based choices. (see Test condition below). Three things are particularly cool about the paper: (1) Authors set social comparative and absolute […]