Benoît de Courson

• Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime Security and Law

The impacts of poverty and material scarcity on human decision making appear paradoxical. One set of findings associates poverty with risk aversion, whilst another set associates it with risk taking. We present an idealized general model, the ‘desperation threshold model’ (DTM), that explains how both these accounts can be correct. The DTM assumes...

Outcomes in the cultural arena are due to many factors but are there general rules that can suggest what makes some cultural traits successful and others not? Research in cultural evolution theory distinguishes factors related to social influence (such as copying from the majority, or from certain individuals) from factors related to individual, no...

In situations of poverty, do people take more or less risk? One hypothesis states that poverty makes people avoid risk, because they cannot buffer against losses, while another states that poverty makes people take risks, because they have little to lose. Each hypothesis has some previous empirical support. Here, we test the ‘desperation threshold’...

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that news media often present a skewed portrayal of society, particularly with respect to gender. This distorted picture manifests in two main ways : a persistent gap in the exposure of men and women in media content, and the perpetuation of entrenched gender stereotypes in the same content. However,...

Poverty is associated with psychological variables such as increased anxiety, increased depression, steeper time discounting and greater risk aversion. However, less is known about whether short‐term changes in financial circumstances are coupled to immediate psychological responses. We present data from the Changing Cost of Living study, in which...

Cet article introduit le grand corpus ouvert LRFAF, qui contient 37307 textes de rap français et leurs métadonnées. En utilisant des méthodes de lexicométrie et de traitement automatique des langues, il se propose une première exploration numérique du corpus. Il combine (i) une analyse diachronique, à la recherche des tendances lourdes connues par...

In situations of poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories state that poverty makes people 'vulnerable': they cannot buffer against losses, and therefore avoid risk. Yet, other theories state the opposite: poverty makes people 'desperate': they have little left to lose, and therefore take risks. Each theory has some support: most stu...

Poverty is associated with psychological variables such as increased anxiety, increased depression, steeper time discounting and greater risk aversion. However, less is known about whether short-term changes in financial circumstances are coupled to immediate psychological responses. We present data from the Changing Cost of Living study, in which...

People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a l...

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 = 22943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300 - 1850). Ou...

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalize it in a mathem...

People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. A recent theoretical model explored the consequences of positing a desperation threshold, a critical level of resources below which it is d...

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalise it in a mathem...

Gallicagram est un outil de lexicométrie développé pour la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales. Il offre aux chercheurs un moyen de tester rigoureusement leurs hypothèses et de quantifier les effets observés en tirant profit de très vastes bases de données linguistiques, délimitées, accessibles et structurées. La maîtrise des corpus, l'accès...

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, which is a necessary condition for social learning’...

Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitatio...

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, which is a necessary condition for social learning'...

Humans sometimes cooperate, and sometimes exploit one another. The prevalence of interpersonal exploitation is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime and lower trust. Models of the evolution of cooperation have not yet shown why this should be. We created an evolutionary model of cooperat...

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 uns...