About
Benoît de Courson is a Research Officer in the Department of Methodology. He is about to defend his PhD in the University of Leiden, having been funded and hosted by the Max Planck Institute-CSL in Freiburg and the École normale supérieure in Paris.
He has a background in social sciences, history and mathematics. He is currently a member of the rep²si research project.
Benoît is a computational social scientist with interdisciplinary interests. His PhD focused on modeling decision making (in particular, risk taking, time discounting and violence) in situations of poverty. He is also interested in formal models of cultural evolution and in natural language processing.
He develops the lexicometrics application and database Gallicagram, a tool to explore word frequencies in French press and heritage corpora.
Research
Publications:
de Courson B., Frankenhuis W., Nettle D., Poverty is associated with both risk avoidance and risk taking: an empirical test of the desperation threshold model, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2025
Pfänder, J.; de Courson, B.; Mercier, H., How wise is the crowd: Can we infer people are accurate
and competent merely because they agree with each other?, Cognition, 2025
Nettle D., Chevallier C., de Courson B., Johnson E.A., Johnson M.T., Pickett K., Short-term changes in financial situation have immediate mental health consequences: The Changing Cost of Living Study, Social Policy & Administration, 2024
Radkani S., Holton E., de Courson B., Saxe R., Nettle D., Desperation and inequality increase stealing: evidence from experimental microsocieties, Royal Society Open Science, 2023
de Courson B., Frankenhuis W., Nettle D., van Gelder J.-L., Why is violence high and persistent in deprived communities? A formal model, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2023
de Courson B., Azoulay B., de Courson C., Vanni L., Brunet E., Gallicagram : les archives de presse sous les rotatives de la statistique textuelle, Corpus, 2023
de Courson B., Thouzeau V., Baumard N. Quantifying the scientific revolution, Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2023
de Courson B. & Nettle D., Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?, Scientific Reports, 2021
de Courson B., Fitouchi L., Bouchaud J.-P. & Benzaquen M., Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable, Scientific Reports, 2021