Season 1

The transition from seeing humans as individual rational actors to group-centric, tribal creatures. Why moral intuitions precede moral reasoning. How evolutionary moral matrices — loyalty, authority, sanctity — shape the scripts people use to justify family structures, gender roles, and social order.

Papers Haidt (2001), "The emotional dog and its rational tail" · Maslow (1943), "A theory of human motivation"

Skill Basic paper architecture — Abstract, Introduction, Discussion. Learn to read before you synthesize.

Lens How do group dynamics and evolutionary moral matrices establish traditional family scripts — and why do attacks on those scripts feel like attacks on identity?

Tracing behavior from evolutionary hardware to adaptive culture. How natural selection shaped cognition, sex differences, and social instincts long before civilization arrived. Stewart-Williams bridges evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution without the ideological baggage that typically accompanies either.

Papers Kahneman & Tversky (1979), "Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk" · Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan (2010), "The weirdest people in the world"

Skill Extracting the hypothesis, evidence, and underlying assumptions from a paper before evaluating its conclusions.

Lens How do early childhood developmental environments and paternal inputs physically manifest in evolutionary adaptations and biological constants?

Mapping cognitive biases, blind spots, and irrational incentives through a systems and product thinking lens. Re-reading Ariely not for the stories but for the methodology — how he isolates a variable, designs a controlled condition, and measures a behavior that people insist they don't exhibit.

Papers Kahneman & Tversky (1974), "Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases"

Skill Dissecting methodology and results sections. What exactly did they measure, and does the measurement actually capture what they claim?

Lens What systematic cognitive biases and risk-taking behaviors emerge when young men lack structural social anchors or clear life milestones?

Isolating cultural and policy variables. Reeves is one of the few writers on male underperformance who leads with data rather than grievance — he treats the male drift in education and the workforce as a structural problem, not a culture war flashpoint. Month 4 is where personal interest and empirical rigor are supposed to collide most directly.

Papers Hardin (1968), "The tragedy of the commons"

Skill Isolating cultural and policy variables. Understanding why structural shifts — not individual failure — drive population-level behavioral change.

Lens Why do different cultures experience varying rates of family structure decay, and how do changing civilizational incentives alter male participation and performance?

The shift from consuming psychology to evaluating it. Cialdini's compliance mechanics — social proof, authority, scarcity — get read not as persuasion tactics but as vulnerabilities. Month 5 pairs this with a direct look at the replication crisis: p-hacking, publication bias, and the effect size problem that undermines a significant portion of the findings from the previous four months.

Papers Ioannidis (2005), "Why most published research findings are false" · Open Science Collaboration (2015), "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science"

Skill Evaluating evidence quality, not just evidence existence. Identifying alternative explanations, data limitations, and compliance shortcuts in published research.

Lens How do modern compliance mechanics exploit psychological vulnerabilities in the absence of traditional community guardrails?

Full paper reading mastery, hidden motives, and economic status signaling. Simler and Hanson argue that most human behavior — medicine, education, conversation, charity — is driven by signaling rather than stated purpose. Month 6 applies that lens to everything read in the previous five months, and then turns it inward: what does the way I engaged with this material tell me about why I actually started it?

Papers 1–2 full journal papers per week, self-selected from whichever subfield is pulling hardest by October.

Skill Identifying the gap — every paper ends with "future directions." A thesis lives there. By Post 12: find what a paper leaves unanswered and say why it matters.

The decision Master's track or lifelong hobby. Both are valid. The honest essay is the evidence; the answer is already in it.