© Joseph Watts

Academic Interests

Humans are a particularly odd ape. We choose clothes based on arbitrary fashions; we perform elaborate rituals with opaque causal mechanisms, and we travel into outer space. Underlying this oddity is the human capacity for culture.

As a researcher, I am interested in how human culture is generated, transmitted, and changed over time. I often take a cultural evolutionary approach to research and am a member of the Cultural Evolution Society. The focus of my research ranges in scale from individual-level cognitive processes up to cultural-level patterns of change in human history.

Further information about my research can be found on the Research page, and my full list of publications is available in my CV.

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Background

I come from Whanganui, New Zealand and received my PhD in Psychology from the University of Auckland in 2017. I have since held positions as a Research Fellow in the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Group at the University of Oxford, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and a Senior Lecturer in the Religion Programme at the University of Otago.

I am currently an External Research Associate of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as well as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.