On 18 May 2026, Émile Servan-Schreiber shared the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence’s account of the 37th annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference. The meeting had taken place on 13–16 May at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University’s Rabat campus, co-hosted by the school and the Africa Institute for Research in Economics and Social Sciences, AIRESS. The organisers’ recap described four days of plenaries, posters and cross-cultural discussion.
The school’s account highlighted cooperation and digital behaviour among the thematic tracks. It thanked Edmond Seabright and Sarah Alami for their organisational work. Servan-Schreiber shared the recap with a brief endorsement of the gathering. These subjects bring the study of individual reasoning into contact with the ways people coordinate and exchange information.
The evolution of reason meets cultural evolution
HBES met alongside the Cultural Evolution Society, whose conference ran on 11–13 May. The societies shared 13 May, with Hugo Mercier of CNRS giving a joint plenary on the evolution of reason and the cultural evolution of reasons. The official programme identifies him with psychology at CNRS/Jean Nicod.
The other plenaries ranged widely. Brooke Scelza examined human mating beyond familiar dichotomies; Hanna Kokko considered longevity from an evolutionary perspective; Sara Lowes connected culture, policy and economic development. Youssef Bokbot discussed cultural and technological innovation in Morocco. Simon Baron-Cohen delivered the keynote on autism and human invention. HBES’s subsequent conference report confirms these sessions and the shared day with CES.
Why the research setting matters
These subjects ask how people learn, coordinate and develop ways of thinking. For collective forecasting, they raise a practical question: how do individual judgements form before they are combined? A useful estimate needs both relevant information and a process for bringing different contributions together. Evolutionary research offers another way to examine those processes.
The same educational thread runs through Servan-Schreiber’s teaching on forecasting at IE University and UM6P. The school’s role as conference co-host put reasoning, culture, economics and cooperation into a shared research setting. The programme’s breadth matters because collective intelligence involves several connected questions: what people know, how they learn from others, and how they turn that knowledge into coordinated action.
