Current Lab Members
Principal Investigator
Dr. Joe Henrich
Ruth Moore Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
space
Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr. Damian Blasi
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topics: Liguistic complexity and population size: linquistic diversity in cognitive science
I study the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural underpinnings of the languages of the world, not only as they exist now but also as they unfolded over the course of the Holocene. I rely primarily on the statistical and computational analysis of diverse observational data, from grammars of endangered languages to ethnohistorical descriptions, paleoanthropological evidence, and massive corpora. (Website)
Dr. Joseph Dexter
Data Science Fellow, Harvard University (January 2024: Assistant Professor, Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau)
Lab-related topics: Historical psychology, linguistic fairness
A computational biologist by training, I have broad interests across data science, and I am particularly enthusiastic about research that brings together traditionally quantitative and qualitative disciplines. To that end, most of my research is concentrated in two interdisciplinary areas: the Digital Humanities, including computational text analysis for Latin, ancient Greek, and other premodern traditions and the cultural evolution of literature, and systems biology and mathematical modeling for biomedicine. I am the co-founder and co-director of the Quantitative Criticism Lab.
Dr. Jennifer Devereaux
Mind, Brain, and Behavior Fellow, Harvard University
Lecturer, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
I research emotion and specialize in cognitive theory, the ethical use of AI, and the meaning of friendship. I teach a course on the evolution of friendship.
I'm also a classicist: https://classics.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-devereaux
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
My research focuses on Economic Growth, Development, History and Culture. I am particularly interested in the deep-rooted factors that shape the coevolution of culture and institutions. I combine theory of human development and cultural evolution with empirical analysis based on survey, experimental, ethnographic, historic and geographic data to explore these questions.
Dr. Liwen Hou
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. My research focuses on ways of using computational methods and large corpora to study language change over time. More broadly, my interests are in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Dr. Maciej Chudek
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
My previous work focused on using psychological evidence (e.g., experiments run on contemporary humans) to test historical hypotheses (i.e., gene-cultural coevolutionary models). After a long break from academia, I'm now joining the Culture, Cognition, & Coevolution lab to explore how historical evidence (i.e., NLP-based analyses of historical texts) can test psychological hypotheses (i.e., claims about how minds work).
Graduate Students
Tommy Flint
G7 in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Broadly I am interested in synthesizing ethnographic and historical accounts to develop insights into human behavior and culture. I’m currently working on a dissertation that investigates the transition from adolescence to adulthood, from evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives. Guiding questions include: What factors influence the timing at which young people begin their reproductive careers? How do different societies manage the emergent sexuality and reproductive potential of maturing adolescents? How and why does our behavior change when we marry and have children?
Cammie Curtin
G6 in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
I am interested in understanding how human cultural practices evolve and, relatedly, how they shape psychology and behavior. My current work examines how social norms and institutions– such as those governing kinship, economic exchange, and community structure– impact how people think and behave. My research combines cultural evolutionary theory with methods from anthropology, psychology, and behavioral economics. As part of this, I do fieldwork in Zapotec communities of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico
Tian Chen (TC) Zeng
G5 in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
s
Affiliates
Dr. Max Posch
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Exeter Business School, Department of Economics
Research Associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
I study the social and cultural foundations of long-run economic development. I have specialized in measuring the evolution of cultural traits using text-data from 300 years of U.S. local newspapers. Website: https://maxposch.com/
Dr. Mohammad AtariAssistant Professor, Department of Psychology, UMass Amherst
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
I am a social psychologist, interested in why and how morality binds people together, but also blinds them into ‘‘us’’ vs. ‘‘them.’’ I am currently examining the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie cultural change and development of institutions using a collection of methodological approaches, including social psychological experiments, survey-based assessment, computational modeling, and historical text analysis.
I am a social psychologist, interested in why and how morality binds people together, but also blinds them into ‘‘us’’ vs. ‘‘them.’’ I am currently examining the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie cultural change and development of institutions using a collection of methodological approaches, including social psychological experiments, survey-based assessment, computational modeling, and historical text analysis.
Dr. Ivan Kroupin
Postdoctoral Fellow, Muthukrishna Lab, London School of Economics
Lab-related topics: Formal education, cognitive abilities: kinship and psychological variation
The structure of human cognition is underdetermined by our genetic makeup to a unique degree - evident from our species' unparalleled diversity of cognitive and behavioral repertoires. It follows that determining which repertoire an individual human ends up developing with must involve non-genetic mechanisms. Specifically, culture - cumulatively developed across generations and individually learned in ontogeny - plays a central role in helping to determine the structure individuals' minds.
My general interest is in developing representational, cognitive accounts of what it how it is that cultural experience structures cognition. I pursue this issue across a variety of topics, with a particular interest in basic cognitive capacities - abstract, analogical reasoning and executive function. The research program is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining a background of philosophy and developmental cognitive science with emerging work with anthropological and ethnographic insights and methods.
Assistant Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University
Research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University
CEO of One Pencil Project
Lab-related topics: Formal education, cognitive abilities: kinship and psychological variation
Associate Professor of Economic Psychology, London School of Economics
Lab-related topics: Formal education, cognitive abilities: kinship and psychological variation
My research focuses on answering three broad questions: (1) Why are humans so different to other animals? (2) What are the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and social change, and how is information transmitted, maintained, and modified? (3) How can the answers to these questions be used to tackle some of the challenges we face as a species? I use a two-pronged methodological approach to answer these questions, combining mathematical and computational modeling (evolutionary models, social network models, etc.), and experimental and data science methods from psychology and economics. I use the “Theory of Human Behavior” that emerges from this approach to tackle a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, and the navigation of cross-cultural differences.
I am particularly interested in the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy.
Dr. Patrick J. Burns
Associate Research Scholar: Digital Projects, NYU/Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
Lab-related topic: Historical psychology
My research interests are computational philology and natural language processing with an emphasis on historical languages, primarily Latin and Ancient Greek. I received my doctorate from Fordham University in Classics in 2016 and have been active since in digital Classics research serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and as a research associate in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab. Lastly, I am a developer with the Classical Language Toolkit, a Python framework for multilingual approaches to historical-language NLP. More information about my research can be found at https://diyclassics.github.io/.
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Lab-related project: Anansi
Dr. Patricia Greenfield
Distinguished Professor of Psychology, UCLA
Associate, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
My central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between social change, cultural evolution, and human development – both ontogeny and phylogeny. With collaborators in the U.S. and around the world, I explore shifts in human development as ecologies and cultures change over spans of time ranging from months to centuries. With my collaborators, I have also explored the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny through cross-species comparisons in the clade consisting of humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. (See linked bibliography for work in both these areas.) In the coming academic year, I very much look forward to exchanging ideas with members of the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab!
Websites:
Greenfield laboratory for Culture and Human Development
Weaving Generations Together: Evolving creativity in the Maya of Chiapas
Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles
Lab Manager
Mona J. Xue
Culture, Cognition, & Coevolution Lab Manager
In 2021, I earned a B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle. During this time, I completed a senior honors thesis through the Anthropology Departmental Honors program where I modeled the evolutionary plausability that mating behavior and sex-typical behavior are evoked or learned. Additionally, I led research projects within the Anthropology department, including a project looking at the relationship between telomere length and anti-müllerian hormone. Presently, I am interested in applying dual-inheritance frameworks to sex and gender.