How do cultures shape human minds, and what made China Chinese? My work moves between the general question and the case on which I test it.

What made China Chinese?

What Made China Chinese? asks why Chinese civilization developed as it did: why its kinship, ritual, religion, and habits of thought took the forms they did, and why so much of that pattern endured across dynasties. I answer with the tools of cultural evolutionary theory, testing explanations against evidence from archaeology, history, classical texts, and experimental psychology. I worked on the book as a 2025–26 Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany.

Related papers

Thinking together

Henrike Moll and I study shared intentionality, the capacity to share attention, goals, and perspectives with others, and its place in explanations of how humans became a cultural species. With Jake Mackey we wrote critical reviews of the leading accounts by Cecilia Heyes, Michael Tomasello, and Kevin Laland (2019, 2021, 2022); Tomasello, and separately Anton Killin and Ross Pain, published replies. With Xin (Alice) Zhao we are now comparing cognitive style in young children from rice-growing and wheat-growing regions of China and the United States. The study draws on my case studies of holistic cognitive style in the Book of Changes, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the sinification of Buddhism, and on my 2025 review of the experimental evidence.

Key papers

Agency and religion

Joey Wagoner, Daniel Lim, and I have completed several cross-cultural experiments on free will, causation, and responsibility, work the John Templeton Foundation supported through Hillsdale College from 2022 to 2024. The first papers find that untutored intuitions about divine foreknowledge and free will are compatibilist in samples from the United States, India, and South Korea, and examine how well participants understand determinism. Papers on causal reasoning across seven cultures and on karma and responsibility among Mahāyāna and Theravāda Buddhists are under review or in preparation. With Patrick Durkee and Wagoner I have also tested what inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism predict about kinship and coalitional formidability in three cultures (Human Nature, in press). A topic-modeling study with Marcus Bingenheimer and Justin Brody compares Indian Buddhist texts in Chinese translation with texts composed in China (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2025).

Key papers

Recently completed: philosophy of science for cultural evolution, 2021–24

I wrote a white paper for the John Templeton Foundation in 2021 on the philosophy of science problems emerging from cultural evolutionary research. The Foundation then funded a research network of fifteen philosophers of science and cultural evolutionary scientists, who met online for eighteen months in 2022–23. Its culmination is our eleven-author review, “Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges” (Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2024). Related papers compare three theories of the institution as an explanatory mechanism (2022) and introduce the special issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture that grew from the workshop Henrike Moll and I convened at Domaine de la Bretesche in July 2022.

Key papers

Earlier work

Five pages describe my earlier research: