The Cultural Dynamics Lab

Religious systems show variation between groups, are transmitted and modified over generations, and differ in their ability to gain and retain members. In other words, religions exhibit the key characteristics of an evolutionary system. 

We build large-scale cross-cultural databases and use models from evolutionary biology to test theories about the functions and effects of religious systems. Examples of our research includes studies on the emergence of religious specialists in hunter-gatherer societies, the co-evolution of human sacrifice and social inequality, and the mechanisms by which Christianity has spread throughout the Pacific

Humans regularly reason about mental states such as beliefs, emotions, intentions, and desires. This capacity, known as mentalising or theory of mind, is foundational to human social learning, empathy, cooperation, and communication. 

We use text and language analysis, as well as experiments to study the role that culture plays in mentalising. Examples of our projects include studies showing that the meaning of emotion concepts vary widely across world languages, experiments investigating the cognitive basis of false belief attributions in preschoolers, and ongoing research testing claims about opacity of mind in Pacific languages.  

Joseph Watts | Lab Director

Dr. Joseph Watts is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Canterbury. More information about Dr Watts is available on his personal website. 

Navdeep Kaur | PhD Student (Otago)

Navdeep’s thesis focuses on testing whether historically available materials constrain the representation of religious imagery and structures, and how these constraints might influence religious belief and behaviour.

COURTNEY MATTHEWS | PhD Student

Courtney is investigating the social processes of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), and how these group dynamics connect to and impact the lives of their players.

KATE McROBERTS | PhD Student

Kate’s PhD focuses on using quantitative models to understand the mechanisms of religious change in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Oliver Deakin | Honours Student

Oliver's research is focussed on cross-cultural variation in mentalising behaviour, how cultural forces inform individual psyches, and linguistic foundations of mental state representation.

Dat Nguyen | Masters Student

Dat's project aims to examine how mind-body dualism is portrayed in Vietnamese and English by analyzing the difference between how mental states and bodily states are represented within the two languages.

Alice Iwabuchi | Masters Student

Alice’s theses is on discovering the extent to which emotions are relational or individual states in different languages.

Monty Hamilton | Honours Student

Monty is studying how Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs) and Credibility Undermining Displays (CRUDs) influence religious disaffiliation, particularly within the population of Jehovah's Witnesses. This research will explore how religious modelling in people's childhood impacts their religiosity later on in life.

YILONG CHEN | Honours Student

Yilong's project uses quantitative research methods to test claims about the forms and functions of witchcraft in early human societies

Esme Maillard | Masters Student
 

Esme developed new scales to test whether Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs) help explain the social transmission of conspiracy beliefs.

Tom Leslie | Honours Student

Tom developed a Turning-inspired test of the theory of mind competencies of large language models, such as ChatGPT.