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I am an evolutionary and cognitive social scientist working in the Evolution and Social Cognition team at Institut Jean-Nicod at ENS-PSL. I draw on cognitive science, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology to explain why cultural phenomena emerge, spread, and evolve. I explore questions such as: Why do certain ideas or practices—like democracy or moral religions—arise in specific historical contexts? Why do humans care about fairness and cooperation? Why has romantic love become increasingly central to modern societies? And why are people so drawn to imaginary worlds?

My work sits at the crossroads of the natural sciences (evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, experimental psychology), the social sciences (social anthropology, economic history, political science), and the humanities (cultural history, moral philosophy, literary theory). I use a wide range of methods—including evolutionary modeling, experiments, surveys, and analyses of online and historical data—and draw on diverse materials such as portraits, novels, and movies.

My publications are indexed on Google Scholar. Here are some recent articles:

Cultural variability (in particular in history):

1. Baumard, N., Safra, L., Martins, M., & Chevallier, C. (2023). Cognitive fossils: using cultural artifacts to reconstruct psychological changes throughout history. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
2. Baumard, N., Huillery, E., Hyafil, A. and Safra, L. (2022) The cultural evolution of love in history, Nature Human Behavior (Supplementary material, supplementary review, data and code here, as well as the Ancient World Values Survey).
3. Safra, L., Chevallier, C., Grèzes, J., Baumard, N. (2020) Tracking the rise of trust in history using machine learning and paintings, Nature Communications

Cultural productions (religions, fictions, artworks, etc.)

1. Fitouchi, L., Singh, M., André, J. B., & Baumard, N. Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing.
2. Sijilmassi, A., Safra, L., & Baumard, N. (2024). ‘Our Roots Run Deep’: Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-44 (response to the commentaries here)
3. Dubourg, E. & Baumard, N. (2021). Why imaginary worlds: The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (response to the commentaries here)

Human morality and cooperation

1. Lie-Panis, J., Fitouchi, L., Baumard, N., & André, J. B. (2024). A model of endogenous institution formation through limited reputational incentives. PNAS
2. Fitouchi, L., André, J. B., & Baumard, N. (2022). Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-71.
3. André, J., Debove, S., Fitouchi, L., & Baumard, N. (2022). Moral cognition as a Nash product maximizer: An evolutionary contractualist account of morality. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2hxg

LLMs

1. Varnum, M. E., Baumard, N., Atari, M., & Gray, K. (2024). Large Language Models based on historical text could offer informative tools for behavioral science. PNAS, 121(42), e2407639121.
2. Dubourg, E., Thouzeau, V., & Baumard, N. (2024). A step-by-step method for cultural annotation by LLMs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 7, 1365508.
3. de Dampierre, C., Mogoutov, A., & Baumard, N. (2024). Towards Transparency: Exploring LLM Trainings Datasets through Visual Topic Modeling and Semantic Frame. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.06574.

Cultural evolution theory

1. Baumard, N., & André, J. B. (2025). The ecological approach to culture. Evolution and Human Behavior, 46(3), 106686.
2. Baumard, N., Fitouchi, L., André, J. B., Nettle, D., & Scott-Philipps, T. (in press). The gene’s-eye view of culture, in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
3. André, J. B., Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2023). Cultural evolution from the producers’ standpoint. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 5, e25.

Teaching

I supervise the ‘Social Sciences’ track of the Master of Cognitive Sciences and the PhD Program of Cognitive Sciences (here are some tips if you want to join our programs). I am also supervise the new Master AI and Society.

I also teach ‘Introduction to anthropology’ in the College of Science, Humanities and Society of Université PSL, and ‘Human Behavior, Societies and Cultures’ in the Master of Cognitive Sciences.

I am looking for a PhD student in computational humanities, see here.