Lou Safra’s research while affiliated with Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po and other places

The commentaries addressed various aspects of our account of historical myths. We respond by clarifying the evolutionary theory of coalitional psychology that underlies our claims (R1). This addresses concerns about the role of fitness interdependence in large groups (R2), cultural transmission processes (R3), alternative routes to nation-building (R4) and the role of proximal mechanisms (R5). Finally, we evaluate alternative theories (R6) and discuss directions for future research (R7).

Anti-immigration attitudes remain widespread across Western societies, raising concerns for social cohesion. This study investigates whether correcting misperceptions about immigrants' perceived deservingness—using cues such as intent to contribute and efforts to overcome socio-economic challenges—can counter anti-immigration prejudice. In Study 1 (N = 474), a factorial survey experiment showed that low-status immigrants were viewed more favorably when they exhibited deservingness traits. Studies 2a (N = 1,506) and 2b (N = 1,255), conducted as one-week longitudinal studies during the 2024 European and French parliamentary elections, revealed that an information treatment emphasizing deservingness cues strongly reduced misperceptions about immigrants, modestly reduced opposition to immigration, and had an even smaller effect for anti-immigration voting. These findings suggest that while immigrants are often perceived negatively, emphasizing perceived deservingness can mitigate prejudice, presenting a promising strategy for reducing anti-immigration bias.

In four preregistered studies, we tested implications from a cooperation model that explains victim-blaming as a strategic move, as a way for people to avoid the costs of helping victims (who seem to be unpromising cooperation partners) without paying the reputational cost of being seen as ungenerous, reluctant cooperators. An implication of this perspective is that, if an individual is identified as a poor cooperation prospect to start with, people would be likely to blame that individual for his/her own misfortune, notably by suggesting that the victim was negligent. The four studies presented here support this interpretation, as participants attributed more negligence to an accident victim if that victim had been initially described as less prosocial, either because they denied benefits to others or because they created costs for others. These results are consistent with a familiar result, that people blame victims more if they feel (or want to be seen as) more socially distant from that victim. The present studies may offer a simple, cooperation-based account of this and other aspects of victim-blaming.

Combining frameworks from both migration studies and psychology, this study examines the factors that have contributed to refugees’ resilience amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Lesbos, Greece. Twenty-three in-depth interviews were conducted with refugees and international humanitarian actors and subsequently analyzed using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. Ten key protective factors are presented, operating at the individual, interpersonal, and community levels. These factors encompass behavioral and cognitive factors at the individual level, as well as social support and community resources such as self-organization, self-advocacy, and organizational support. Our analysis, informed by a multisystemic framework of resilience, revealed that these factors are fundamentally interconnected and shaped by the institutional macrosystem. The broader social, political, and built environment plays a critical role, either facilitating or impeding resilience, sometimes resulting in protective factors causing harm. This paper offers insights into how intensified containment affects access to resilience-enhancing resources.

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

A portrait is an exercise of impression management: the sitter can choose the impression she or he wants to create in the eyes of others’: competence, trustworthiness, dominance, etc. Indirectly, this choice informs us about the qualities that were specifically valued at the time the portrait was created. In a previous paper, we have shown that cues of perceived trustworthiness in portraits increased in time during the modern period in Europe, meaning that people probably granted more importance to be seen as a trustworthy person. Moreover, this increase is correlated to economic development. In this study, we aim to replicate this result, using more controlled databases: 1) a newly created database of European head-of-state sovereigns (N = 966, from 1400 to 2020), that is a database of individuals holding the same social position across time and countries, and 2) a database of very high-quality portraits digitized with the same technique, and coming from the same Museum, the Chateau de Versailles database (N = 2,291, from 1483 to 1938). Using mixed effects linear models, we observed in the first dataset that the modeled perceived facial trustworthiness of these sovereigns’ faces increased over time (b = 0.182 ± 0.04 s.e.m., t(201) = 4.40, p < 0.001). On the opposite, no effect of time was detected on the portraits of the Château de Versailles (b = − 0.02 ± 0.03 s.e.m., t(759) = − 0.85, p > .250). We conclude by discussing the potential of this new technique to uncover long-term behavioral changes in history, as well as its limitations.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease that was first recognized in China in late 2019. Among the primary effects caused by the pandemic, there was the dissemination of health preventive measures such as physical distancing, travel restrictions, self-isolation, quarantines, and facility closures. This includes the global disruption of socio-economic systems including the postponement or cancellation of various public events (e.g., sporting, cultural, or religious), supply shortages and fears of the same, schools and universities closure, evacuation of foreign citizens, a rise of unemployment, changes in the international aid schemes, misinformation, and incidents of discrimination toward people affected by or suspected of having the COVID-19 disease. The pandemic has brought to the fore unpreparedness in critical areas that require attention, amid prospects and challenges. Moreover, considerable reorganization efforts are required with implications for assets, resources, norms, and value systems. COVID-19 is challenging the concept of globalization and stimulating responses at the levels of local and regional socio-economic systems that lead to the mobilization of assets that have been unrecognized earlier on, such as various forms of economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and creative capital. For example, through digital channels, local groups are forming to create schemes of support for physical and mental wellbeing. These emerging exchanges lead to various social and technological innovations by building on skills and assets that are less important in the free-market economy, such as empathy, skills for crafts, making and fixing; locally grown microgreens; and micromanufacturing. Isolation and local living are also making it much harder to ignore the civic responsibilities towards communities, meant as individuals, vulnerable groups, and local businesses. Whilst the pandemic is limiting physical participation, this challenging time is uncovering alternative ways of mutual support, which may create long-term benefits for socio-economic systems, including environmental and biodiversity protection, reduction of the air pollution, and climate action. The pandemic’s threat to public health will hopefully be overcome with implications for disruption for an extended period that we are unable to forecast at this stage. It is key to focus on studies recognizing the activities and interventions leading to the recovery of socio-economic systems after the pandemic. Reflecting and planning on how societies and economies will go back to “business as usual” requires new forms of communication and cooperation, imaginative design thinking, new styles of management, as well as new tools and forms of participation in various public policies. Many questions related to the care of the vulnerable, economic restart, and the risk of future pandemics, to mention but a few, are already occupying the academic, scientific, experts, and activist communities, who have started to imagine the “new normal.”