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Curriculum vitae, October 2026 (PDF)

My major research goal is to understand the transmissive and coordinative features of Chinese thought and culture, and their influence on emotion, cognition, and behavior across the generations, by using whatever scientific and philosophical methods needed. This goal has gained importance in an interconnected world in which China's influence is paramount and growing. A major obstacle in understanding and appraising the influence of Chinese culture is the lack of integration between the Humanities and Social Sciences. I pin hopes for an emergent explanatory unity on development of cultural evolutionary theory.

Understanding influences of, and influences on, Chinese culture, animates areas of current research. In cultural evolutionary theory, Henrike Moll, Jake Mackey and I authored a series of long-form critical reviews of major recent works (by K. Laland, M. Tomasello, and C. Heyes) in an attempt to heighten the theoretical acumen of interdisciplinary explanation in this thriving field. With the help of a grant from the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, Inc., Dr. Moll and I gathered together leaders in the field of cultural evolution at a chateau in Brittany in the summer of 2022 for a pre-read workshop about explanatory mechanisms in this field. In data science and Humanities computing, Kristoffer Nielbo, Ted Slingerland, Uffe Bergeton and I have conducted several machine learning projects with a large corpus of influential historical Chinese documents in an effort to resolve canonical interpretive issues in history of philosophy and to understand complex interactions between culture and cognition. From 2019 to 2021 I led a project that brought together into a workshop renowned China researchers in Philosophy, Social Psychology, Cultural Neuroscience, Law, Anthropology, Developmental Psychology, Literature and more in an effort to understand Chinese morality and its varied causes and effects. Our book, The Routledge International Handbook of Morality, Cognition, and Emotion in China, appeared in 2022, and a Chinese edition followed in 2023.

My current work falls in three camps. The first is dedicated to a book about what made China Chinese. The second continues my collaboration with Henrike Moll. Having written together on shared intentionality and on how humans became a cultural species, we are now, with Xin (Alice) Zhao, comparing cognitive style in young children from rice-growing and wheat-growing regions of China and the United States. The third concerns agency and religion. Joey Wagoner and I have completed several cross-cultural experiments on free will, causation, and responsibility, work the John Templeton Foundation supported via a subaward through Hillsdale College; we are writing up our results.

I’ve led with a description of research done in collaboration because learning from and working with world-leading experts gives me the best opportunity to generate cultural evolutionary understanding of Chinese thought and culture in the remainder of my lifetime. In addition to these collaborative projects though I also write and publish solo articles in the same areas of inquiry. By Fall 2021 I completed a series of four articles examining components of what psychologists refer to as ‘East Asian cognitive style’. This included three ‘applied’ studies demonstrating unique-making features of East Asian cognitive style at work in the Book of Changes, in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and, with Nick Jones, in the sinification of Buddhism. Another, published in the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science in 2025, comprehensively reviews experimental evidence for the cross-cultural variability of cognitive style.

Public engagement

Teaching

At Cal State Fullerton I have taught courses from Introduction to Philosophy and Critical Thinking to Asian Philosophy, Experimental Philosophy, and the honors seminar How China Became Chinese.

Contact: rnichols@fullerton.edu · ORCID · Google Scholar · PhilPapers · Cal State Fullerton faculty profile