🇿🇦 Postdoc using an evolutionary lens to examine human & other animal behavior, currently studying what types of news content gain attention on here (X).
Joined October 2012
- Tweets 121
- Following 903
- Followers 216
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11 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
31 Mar 2020
Our article (my first published paper) in @NatureHumBehav on the dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology is out! With @DrQueue @scottclaessens @ChrisGSibley
and Ananish Chaudhuri. nature.com/articles/s41562-0…
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
7 Oct 2025
“Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I apply this idea to the democratising character of social media and connect it to the rise of right-wing populism:
conspicuouscognition.com/p/i…
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
27 Jun 2025
🚨New preprint with @Arkyfish
What drives engagement with *reliable* news on social media?
27 Jun 2025
Very happy to share the preprint of the study @acerbialberto and I have been working on, showing that, like fake news, factual news uses negative and divisive (including group-binding, anti-outgroup, and dominance-oriented) content to get attention. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jvxe…
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27 Jun 2025
Very happy to share the preprint of the study @acerbialberto and I have been working on, showing that, like fake news, factual news uses negative and divisive (including group-binding, anti-outgroup, and dominance-oriented) content to get attention. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jvxe…
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18 Jun 2025
Had fun, met a lot of great people, and saw some very interesting talks at HBES & NEEPS evolutionary psychology conferences in Atlantic City, USA! For HBES, I presented the below work that I'm doing with @acerbialberto
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
23 May 2025
Looking forward to be in Paris next week for the conference "Explaining culture: an interdisciplinary approach".
I will present some new work with @Arkyfish - first version of slides and abstract at the link!
acerbialberto.com/talk/2025_…
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30 Apr 2025
Self-control is crucial for success but is not really something you can get better at. Instead, it's a personality trait. So, if you don't have much of it, you probably never will, and will have to use many life hacks to control your behaviors, e.g., Ozempic.
30 Apr 2025
I confess: I spent decades selling a self-control narrative that was wrong. My new Substack explains why self-control doesn't work the way we thought, and how we accidentally created a moral meritocracy around personality traits we don't choose.
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
30 Mar 2025
What if the truth about AI is more boring than we'd like? by @danwilliamsphil open.substack.com/pub/conspi…
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
26 Feb 2025
I wrote this thing about @JDVance , ordo amoris, and what we owe each other. medium.com/@nicholaraihani/a…
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26 Feb 2025
Economic game studies show conservatives are less prosocial, but it is specifically economic conservatism that is linked to selfishness/competitiveness whereas social conservatism is not, & is instead linked to 'groupishness'/intergroup-biased prosociality osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vc…
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25 Feb 2025
Ever wondered whether progressives are really nicer than conservatives? Check out our very short chapter that just came out in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Behavioural and Experimental Economics! osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vc…
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26 Feb 2025
Overall, economic game studies show conservatives are less prosocial, but more specifically it is economic conservatism that is linked to selfishness/competitiveness whereas social conservatism is not, and is instead linked to 'groupishness' and intergroup-biased pro-sociality.
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15 Jan 2025
Preprint of @acerbialberto and my chapter for the EHBEA textbook “Evolution, Culture and Human Behavior”. We harness the explanatory power of an evolutionary perspective to examine digital media’s effects on wellbeing, cooperation, misinfo, and politics. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/6z…
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
9 Jul 2024
1/ THREAD 🧵Elite panic over A.I. disinformation and deepfakes in the EU elections was rampant. But did democracy drown in tidal wave of disinformation? 🔎Let’s take a look.
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
14 Jun 2024
“While some evolutionary psychology research focuses on adverse elements of the human experience, it would be…foolish to think that evolutionary psychologists…are advocating for such phenomena simply by studying and documenting them.”
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/…
@PsychToday
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
31 May 2024
Excellent point. Vaccine-related flagged misinformation was 0.3% on Facebook (usual) BUT non-flagged vaccine-skeptical content was much more diffused and had a 46X estimated effect.
Study news not fake news! science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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29 May 2024
I agree with this: "Ultimately, both Haidt and his critics overstate their evidence. The former’s case isn’t strong enough to prove that iPhones “destroyed” Gen Z, but it also isn’t so weak that it can be dismissed as the mere byproduct of a moral panic." vox.com/24127431/smartphones…
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
15 Apr 2024
Experts who write fearfully about misinformation often depict humans as gullible saps whose zombie minds are infected by lies spread by social media.
In this week's @NewYorker, I argue that these writers get something fundamentally wrong how beliefs work: newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…
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18 Dec 2023
Happy to be starting as a postdoc working on how to increase engagement with reliable information online, with @acerbialberto
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Kyle Fischer retweeted
8 Dec 2023
New essay: I argue that misinformation is often better viewed as a symptom of deep societal problems rather than their cause. When that’s true, interventions like debunking and censorship are unlikely to help – and might make things worse. (1/15)
iai.tv/articles/misinformati…
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