Cultural Evolution Workshop January 13-15, Washington University in St. Louis p  a  r  t  i  c  i  p  a  n  t  s  &  o b s e r v e r s

i n v i t e d   p  a  r  t  i  c  i  p  a  n  t  s

Nicolas Baumard		I am a PhD student working with Dan Sperber. I try to integrate evolutionnary, cognitive and cultural  approaches to morality. In particular, I study how human social cognition (theory of mind) and the capacity to share norms have changed  the possibility of cooperation and allowed to solve collective action  problems.
Robert Boyd		My research is focused on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to and shape human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. I have done much of this work in collaboration with Peter J. Richerson.
Pascal Boyer		In my research I try to describe functional specialisations in various mental systems, using and gathering evidence from cognitive development, behavioural experiments, and neural functioning. An important goal is to describe the way such functional systems emerge in the course of cognitive development. All this is based on the assumption that evolution by natural selection resulted in a particular cognitive architecture, in particular in the division of labour between a large number of specialised learning systems.
Nicolas Claidiere		I am starting my PhD under the supervision of Dan Sperber on models of cultural evolution. I try to incorporate microprocesses of human communication in a Darwinian approach to cultural phenomena.
Dan Fessler		I approach a variety of aspects of human behavior, experience, and physiology from an integrative perspective in which humans are viewed as both the products of complex evolutionary processes and the possessors of acquired cultural idea systems and behavioral patterns. My research currently focuses on a number of domains including: emotion; sex and reproduction; food and eating; violence and risk-taking; and conformity and cooperation.
Andy Harris		I am a PhD student in political science at Harvard University. I'm interested in  understanding economic development and institutional change as a primarily local phenomenon. My current projects center around decentralization programs in Africa. In the long-term, I'd like to study (and model) how norms shape institutions (and the effectiveness of institutions) through their influence on individual preferences.
Joe Henrich		The cognition and psychology of cultural learning, economic behavior, and mental models; combining ethnographic and experimental techniques, culture-gene coevolution, the origin and psychology of human sociality and cooperation, how evolved psychological capacities and cultural capacities can generate social class, ethnicity, cumulative cultural evolution and the evolution of human societies (institutions), formal modeling and evolutionary game theory.
Larry Hirschfeld		His research interests are primarily in the border area where anthropology and psychology overlap, and they include cognitive development, cultural psychology, social cognition and the anthropology and history of childhood.
Rob Kurzban		My research focuses on the nature of evolved cognitive adaptations for social life. This includes cooperative decision-making in dyads or groups, mating, and friendship. My work also focuses on the cognitive underpinnings of these processes, including issues of modularity. I use methods drawn from experimental economics and cognitive psychology to address these questions.
Pierre Lienard		Pierre Lienard is a post-doctoral visitor at the Instite for Cognition and Culture at Queen's University, Belfast. He has done extensive anthropological research among the Turkana and Nyangatom of East Africa, focusing on the cognitive aspects of ritual action. He is now working on the psychology of ritual behavior in general, from pathology to cultural ritual.
Shaun Nichols		"The emotions play an important role in the normative rules that get fixed in the culture. The history of norms indicates that norms that resonate with our emotions are more likely to survive. Empirical work points to anaccount of moral judgment in which normative rules and emotions make independent contributions to moral judgment." Shaun Nichols on his book Sentimental Rules.
Ara Norenzayan		His areas of research interest focus on cultural psychology, including thought processes across cultures, religious cognition, and the psychology of widespread beliefs. In particular, his studies investigate cultural influences on thinking with a focus on East Asia and the Middle East. His work on religion examines the ways by which psychological factors shape religious cognition, and how religious beliefs in turn affect thought and behavior.
Jade Price		I am a graduate student at UCSB working with John Tooby. Current projects include an evolutionary account of self-conscious emotion, in particular of the feeling of guilt.
Michael Price		Cross-cultural studies of how people cooperate in work teams, in collective actions, and in experimental economic games; reciprocity, reputation, trust, and cooperative punishment; evolutionary psychology.
Stephen Shennan		Application of biological evolutionary theory and methods to archaeology, prehistoric demography, ethnicity, prehistoric social and economic institutions.
Jason Slone		D. Jason Slone is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t (2004, Oxford University Press)
Dan Sperber		Dan Sperber is the author of Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge UP 1975), On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge UP 1985), Explaining Culture (Blackwell 1996). In these three books, He has developed a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of "epidemiology of representations". Dan Sperber is also the co-author, with Deirdre Wilson (Department of Linguistics, University College, London) of Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Blackwell 1986 - Second Revised Edition, 1995).
John Tooby		Tooby and his collaborators have been integrating cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology. The goal of evolutionary psychology is the progressive mapping of the universal evolved cognitive and neural architecture that constitutes human nature, and provides the basis of the learning mechanisms responsible for culture.

o b s e r v e r s

Sage Berg-Cross, Biochemistry graduate student, Washington University

Brian Bergstrom, Psychology graduate student, Washington University

Bill Bottom, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Washington University Business School

Kelly Cann, graduate student

Susan Fitzpatrick, Vice-President, James S McDonnell Foundation

Kim Haddix, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology graduate student, Washington University

Rebecca Hendrickson, Neurosciences graduate student, Washington University

Jon Lanman, Graduate Student, Queen's University Belfast

Patrick McAlvanah – Economics graduate student, Washington University

Joel Mort, Institute of Cognition and Culture, Befast.

Karen Norberg, Visiting instructor in the Dept. of Psychiatry at Washington University, & Visiting research associate in the Olin School of Business

Gualtiero Piccinini, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Christian Prager, University of Bonn

David Rudner, Research Associate in Anthropology, Washington University

David Russell, Pastor

Ryan Tweney, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Bowling Green State University

Caren Walker, Graduate Student

John Whitehouse, Professor, University of Nebraska