How do cultures shape human minds, and what made China Chinese?
Ryan Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, and affiliated with its Center for the Study of Human Nature. He works where the philosophy of science meets cultural evolutionary theory and cross-cultural psychology, and two questions drive that work: how do cultures shape human minds, and why did China develop as it did? His publications have used reading methods, the running of cross-cultural experiments, machine learning on historical Chinese corpora, and agent-based modeling, nearly always with collaborators. In 2025–26 he was a Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany, working on his book project about what made China Chinese.
CV | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | ABOUT
Figure from Slingerland, Nichols, Nielbo & Logan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2017)
What made China Chinese?
A book in progress, written in part as a 2025–26 Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, on why Chinese civilization developed as it did.
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How do humans come to think together?
With Henrike Moll: shared intentionality, how humans became a cultural species, and cognitive style in young children in China and the United States.
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Figure from Bingenheimer, Brody & Nichols, Digital Humanities Quarterly (2025), CC BY-ND 4.0
Do people everywhere reason alike about free will and responsibility?
Cross-cultural experiments with Joey Wagoner on agency, causation, and religion.
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Earlier work
Confucian moral psychology, text analytics, metaphilosophy and method, philosophy of religion, and Thomas Reid.
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Recent
October 2026. “Coalitional formidability and kinship across three cultures,” with Patrick Durkee and Joey Wagoner, is in press at Human Nature.
October 2025. Fellow Lecture at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst: “Understanding What Makes China Chinese: A Report on the Project’s First 20 Years.”
2025. New articles in Religious Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.