Coralie Chevallier

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris | ENS · Département d'Etudes Cognitives

Previous studies have shown that people change their behaviour in response to negative shocks such as economic downturns or natural catastrophes. Indeed, the optimal behaviour in terms of inclusive fitness often varies according to a number of parameters, such as the level of mortality risk in the environment. Beyond unprecedented restrictions in e...

Despite its potential for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, carbon taxation encounters strong public resistance. However, acceptability heavily depends on how tax revenues are used. We test the hypothesis that mental accounting theory can both explain systematic patterns in citizens’ preferences, such as the support for environmental earmarking, an...

Effective climate change mitigation is a social dilemma: the benefits are shared collectively but the costs are often private. To solve this dilemma, we argue that we must pay close attention to the nature and workings of human cooperation. We review three social cognition mechanisms that regulate cooperation: norm detection, reputation management...

Recent empirical research has shown that improving socio-emotional skills such as grit, conscientiousness and self-control leads to higher academic achievement and better life outcomes. However, both theoretical and empirical works have raised concerns about the reliability of the different methods used to measure socio-emotional skills. We compare...

Future-oriented individuals tend to display more pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, compared to those who are present-oriented. Investigating the determinants of time preferences could therefore shed light on factors that also influence environmentalism. A key factor that impacts time preferences is socioeconomic status (SES). Importantly,...

The Coronavirus disease; COVID-19 vaccines will not end the pandemic if they stay in freezers. In many countries, such as France, COVID-19 vaccines hesitancy is high. It is crucial that governments make it as easy as possible for people who want to be vaccinated to do so, but also that they devise communication strategies to address the concerns of...

While indoor air pollution is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, its sources and impacts are largely misunderstood by the public. In a randomized controlled trial including 281 households in France, we test two interventions aimed at raising households' awareness of indoor pollutants and ultimately improving indoor air...

Beyond immediate health consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected people's environment. People had to adapt to new circumstances and take into account the risks related to COVID-19 in their everyday decisions. Given the unprecedented circumstances associated with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we might ask how people ada...

Social trust and income are associated both within and across countries, such that higher income typically correlates with increased trust. While this correlation is well-documented, the psychological mechanisms sustaining this relationship remain poorly understood. One plausible candidate is people’s temporal discounting: on the one hand, trust ha...

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 effec...

Future-oriented individuals tend to display more pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, compared to those who are present-oriented. Investigating the determinants of time preferences could therefore shed light on factors that also influence environmentalism. A key factor that impacts time preferences is socioeconomic status (SES). Importantly,...

The belief-action gap was originally conceptualized by psychologists who aimed to ground behaviour in beliefs but found that their models had little predictive value. The recurrent use of this concept often comes with the assumption that human behaviour is somewhat irrational or weirdly misaligned with their beliefs. This gap is particularly striki...

Cooperation is a universal phenomenon, it is present in all human cultures from hunter–gatherers to industrialised societies, and it constitutes a fundamental aspect of social relationships. There is, however, variability in the amount of resources people invest in cooperative activities. Recent findings indicate that this variability may be partly...

We offer three recommendations to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates. First, use communication campaigns leveraging evidence-based levers and argumentation tools with experts. Second, use behavioral insights to make vaccination more accessible. Third, help early adopters communicate about their decision to be vaccinated to accelerate the emergence...

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Why do moral religions exist? An influential psychological 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...

This article provides experimental evidence of the impact of a four-year inter-vention aimed at developing students’ growth mindset and internal locus ofcontrol in disadvantaged middle schools. We find a 0.07 standard deviationincrease in GPA, associated with a change in students’ mindset, improved be-havior as reported by teachers and school regis...

A correlational study to test the relationship between socio-economic status and reactivity to threats.

The COVID-19 vaccines will not end the pandemic if they stay in freezers. In many countries, such as France, COVID-19 vaccines hesitancy is high. It is crucial that governments make it as easy as possible for people who want to be vaccinated to do so, but also that they devise communication strategies to address the concerns of vaccine hesitant ind...

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

A safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is our only hope to decisively stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2. But a vaccine will only be fully effective if a significant share of the population agrees to get it. Five consecutive surveys of a large, nationally representative sample (N = 1000 for each wave) surveyed attitudes towards a future COVID-19 vacc...

Social trust is linked to a host of positive societal outcomes, including improved economic performance, lower crime rates and more inclusive institutions. Yet, the origins of trust remain elusive, partly because social trust is difficult to document in time. Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically g...

Public health communication play an important role in the fight against COVID-19. We used five well-established psychological levers to improve on the efficacy of two posters used by the French authorities (one on protective behaviors and one on proper handwashing). The five levers were: simplification (streamlining the posters), sunk costs (emphas...

In an effort to inform interventions targeting littering behaviour, we estimate how much a change in trash-bag colour increases trash can visibility in Paris. To that end, we apply standard Signal Detection techniques to test how much changing trash-bag colour from grey to red affects subjects' detection rates. In three pre-registered studies (tota...

Environmental adversity is associated with a wide range of biological outcomes and behaviors that seem to fulfill a need to favor immediate over long-term benefits. Adversity is also associated with decreased investment in cooperation, which is defined as a long-term strategy. Beyond establishing the correlation between adversity and cooperation, t...

Recent empirical research has shown that improving non-cognitive skills such as grit, conscientiousness and self-control leads to higher academic achievement and better life outcomes. These findings have motivated the creation of educational programs targeting non-cognitive skills around the world. However, both theoretical and empirical works have...

It is a trope in psychological science to define the human species as inherently social. Yet, despite its key role in human behaviour, the mechanisms by which social bonding actually shapes social behaviour have not been fully characterized. Across six studies, we show that the motivation for social bonding does not indiscriminately increase indivi...

We investigate whether COVID-19 exposure changes participants’ threat-detection threshold. Sensitivity to threat was measured in a signal detection task among 397 British adults who also reported how much vulnerable they felt to infectious disease. Participants’ data were then matched to the number of confirmed COVID-19 collected from the NHS datab...

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 ta...

The evolutionary basis of religions is a debated issue. A predominant approach hypothesizes that religious beliefs spread via cultural group selection, notably because they enhance prosocial attitudes and large-scale cooperation. Alternative approaches, based on individual selection, suggest that religiosity is a way for individuals to moralize oth...

Depression is characterized by a marked decrease in social interactions and blunted sensitivity to rewards. Surprisingly, despite the importance of social deficits in depression, non-social aspects have been disproportionally investigated. As a consequence, the cognitive mechanisms underlying atypical decision-making in social contexts in depressio...

There is considerable variability in the degree to which individuals rely on their peers to make decisions. Although theoretical models predict that environmental risks shift the cost-benefit trade-off associated with social information use, this idea has received little empirical support. Here we aim to test the effect of childhood environmental a...

Leader choice is a cornerstone of modern democracies and a central topic in cognitive sciences. In the present paper, we discuss an unresolved question in leader choice research: How can the cognitive mechanisms underpinning leader choice be both exquisitely responsive to contextual cues and blatantly suboptimal? Specifically, leaders displaying fe...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Investigating the bases of inter-individual differences in risk-taking is necessary to refine our cognitive and neural models of decision-making and to ultimately counter risky behaviors in real-life policy settings. However, recent evidence suggests that behavioral tasks fare poorly compared to standard questionnaires to measure individual differe...

We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) article on economic folk beliefs. We believe that it is crucial for the future of democracy to identify the cognitive systems through which people form their beliefs about the working of the economy. In this commentary, we put forward the idea that, although many systems are involved, fairness is probably the m...

Depression is characterized by a marked decrease in social interactions and blunted sensitivity to rewards. Surprisingly, despite the importance of social deficits in depression, non-social aspects have been disproportionally investigated. As a consequence, the cognitive mechanisms underlying atypical decision-making in social contexts in depressio...

Individual differences in social motivation have an influence on many behaviours in both clinical and non-clinical populations. As such, social motivation has been identified as a biological trait that is particularly well-suited for dimensional approaches cutting across neuropsychological conditions. In the present paper, we tested whether social...

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 ac...

There is considerable variation in health and reproductive behaviours within and across human populations. Drawing on principles from Life History Theory, psychosocial acceleration theory predicts that individuals developing in harsh environments decrease their level of somatic investment and accelerate their reproductive schedule. Although there i...

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people's leader preferences are partly driven by early s...

There is considerable variation in health and reproductive behaviours within and across human populations. Drawing on principles from Life History Theory, psychosocial acceleration theory predicts that individuals developing in harsh environments decrease their level of somatic investment and accelerate their reproductive schedule. Although there i...

Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has led to an impressive number of studies, the picture that emerges from this research remains inconsistent. Some studies find that Typically Developing (TD) individuals outperform those with ASD in emotion recognition tasks, others find no s...

Background Recent trends in psychiatry have emphasized the need for a shift from categorical to dimensional approaches. Of critical importance to this transformation is the availability of tools to objectively quantify behaviors dimensionally. The present study focuses on social motivation, a dimension of behavior that is central to a range of psyc...

Children show stronger cooperative behavior in experimental settings as they get older, but little is known about how the environment of a child shapes this development. In adults, prosocial behavior toward strangers is markedly decreased in low socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods, suggesting that environmental harshness has a negative impact...

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people’s leader preferences are partly driven by early s...

In contrast with tribal and archaic religions, world religions are characterized by a unique emphasis on extended prosociality, restricted sociosexuality, delayed gratification and the belief that these specific behaviours are sanctioned by some kind of supernatural justice. Here, we draw on recent advances in life history theory to explain this pa...

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has been applied successfully to task-based and resting-based fMRI recordings to investigate which neural markers distinguish individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) from controls. While most studies have focused on brain connectivity during resting state episodes and regions of interest approaches (R...

Abnormal functioning of primary brain systems that express and modulate basic emotional drives are increasingly considered to underlie mental disorders including autism spectrum disorders. We hypothesized that ASD are characterized by disruptions in the primary systems involved in the motivation for social bonding. Twenty adults with ASD were compa...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by social impairments that have been related to deficits in social attention, including diminished gaze to faces. Eye-tracking studies are commonly used to examine social attention and social motivation in ASD, but they vary in sensitivity. In this study, we hypothesized that the ecological nature of...

Introduction. Les neurosciences affectives et sociales suggèrent que des psycho-endo-phénotypes motivationnels et émotionnels seraient des marqueurs primaires de troubles des habiletés sociales dans l’autisme. Objectifs. L’objectif porte sur la détermination de marqueurs psychométriques émotionnels appréhendant la perturbation des habiletés cogniti...

Recent research in moral psychology have suggested that children make judgments about distributive justice early on in development, and in particular they appear to be able to use merit when distributing the benefits of a collective action. This prediction has recently been validated in various western cultures but it is unknown whether it also app...

An important evolutionary function of emotions is to prime individuals for action. Although functional neuroimaging has provided evidence for such a relationship, little is known about the anatomical substrates allowing the limbic system to influence cortical motor-related areas. Using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and probabilistic...

Categorization decisions that reflect constantly changing memory representations might be an important adaptive response to dynamic environments. We assessed One such influence from memory (i.e., sequence effects) on categorization decisions made by individuals with autism. A model of categorization (i.e., memory and contrast model, Stewart, Brown,...

Infants understand harm and fairness in third-party situations and yet children require years of development before they apply this understanding to their own interactions with others. We suggest that the delay is explained by a life-history analysis of when behaving morally becomes beneficial. The human species is characterized by an extended peri...

Background: There is an increasing interest in the behavioral impairments found in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their cognitive and neurobiological substrates. Especially, recent accounts of ASD have emphasized the role of diminished social motivation, which, at the neural level, is construed in relation with impairments in the reward system,...

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by intense emotional responsiveness and poor emotion regulation. Emotion dysregulation often takes the form of increased anxiety in ASD. While very little is known about the neurobiology of anxiety in ASD, the literature on pediatric anxiety disorders has converged on a model where t...