anthropology

#435 Christopher Kavanagh: Religion, Rituals, Belief in Japanese Society, and WEIRD Psychology

Feb 25, 2021

Dr. Christopher Kavanagh is an associate professor in the College of Contemporary Psychology at Rikkyo University and a researcher in cognitive anthropology at the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA) at the University of Oxford. Currently he is based in Japan where he conducts research in collaboration with Masaki Yuki’s Culture, Social Ecology, and Psychology Lab in Hokkaido University. His research interests include East Asian religions, ritual behavior, and the bonding effects of shared dysphoria. He is co-host of the Decoding the Gurus podcast. More»
#434 Thomas Coleman: The Psychology of Believers and Nonbelievers

Feb 22, 2021

Thomas Coleman III is PhD student at Coventry University, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bialystok as part of the Society and Cognition Unit. He draws on multiple approaches from across the sciences and humanities, to study the origins, development, and maintenance of (non)religious worldviews. His research focuses on three areas: Identifying and measuring components of nonreligious worldviews; computer simulated models of the cognitive and social dynamics leading to (non)belief in supernatural agents; investigating how and why moral motivations are stereotypically attributed to religious, as opposed to nonreligious factors. More»
#426 Lyle Steadman: Society, Kinship, Tradition, Ancestor Worship, and Religion

Feb 4, 2021

Dr. Lyle Steadman is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. Dr. Steadman focuses on religion and kinship, especially their interrelationship, and the influence of natural selection on human social and cultural behavior. He has done extensive research among the Hewa, a society in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. A short period of fieldwork was also conducted in an Indian village in Baja California, Mexico. More»
#418 Frederick Coolidge: Neuropsychology, Cognitive Archaeology, and Human Evolution

Jan 15, 2021

Dr. Frederick Coolidge is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of Undergraduate Education in Psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He teaches introductory and advanced undergraduate statistics, cognitive evolution, evolutionary neuropsychology, abnormal psychology, and sleep and dreams. He has received three teaching awards including the lifetime designation, University of Colorado Presidential Teaching Scholar, and he received the UCCS Letters, Arts, and Sciences Annual Outstanding Research and Creative Works Award, in 2004, and the UCCS Annual Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in 2006. For the month of March 2015, he was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Keble College, UK. For the past 6 years, he has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India, teaching courses on brain evolution and sleep and dreams. He’s the coeditor of Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. More»
#414 Robert McCauley & George Graham: Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind

Jan 7, 2021

Dr. Robert McCauley is the William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, at Emory University. More»
#412 Agner Fog: Cultural Evolution, Memetics, Politics and the Media

Jan 1, 2021

Dr. Agner Fog is associate professor of computer science at Technical University of Denmark. Dr. Fog does research in Evolutionary Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Social systems and Computer Science. His current project is 'Theory of cultural change based on evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and cultural evolution.' He’s the author of “Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture”, and “Cultural Selection”. More»
#400 John Hoffecker - Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal

Dec 4, 2020

Dr. John Hoffecker is Fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). He specializes in archaeology and human paleoecology. His primary research focus is the global dispersal of anatomically modern humans, which began more than 50,000 years ago in Africa. He is the author of several books, including Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal (2017). More»
#378 Brian Hare: Survival of the Friendliest

Oct 15, 2020

Dr. Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates (especially bonobos and chimpanzees), and species whose cognition converged with our own (primarily domestic dogs). He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center. He’s the author of several books, including the most recent one, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. More»
#375 Karenleigh Overmann: Cognitive Archaeology, Numeracy, and Language

Oct 8, 2020

Dr. Karenleigh A. Overmann is an associate professor of anthropology (adjunct) at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS) Center for Cognitive Archaeology. She recently completed two years of postdoctoral research at the University of Bergen (MSCA individual fellowship, EU project 785793). She earned her doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford as a Clarendon scholar. She also has a master's degree (psychology) and bachelor's (anthropology, philosophy, English) from UCCS. She’s the editor of Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. More»
#369 Alberto Acerbi: Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age

Sep 24, 2020

Dr. Alberto Acerbi is a Lecturer in Psychology in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. He is a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist with a particular interest in computational science. The main question that drives his research is: is it possible to find some general factors determining why some cultural traits succeed and others do not? He is interested in particular in contemporary cultural phenomena, and he uses a naturalistic, quantitative, and evolutionary approach with different methodologies, especially individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale data. He published a book recently, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age. More»