Talk by Joshua Conrad Jackson: The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes

Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson, a DRRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University and an incoming professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, is going to deliver a talk titled “The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes,” on Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 4-5:30PM (PST). Please click this link to attend. Everyone is welcome! 

Biologically modern humans are more than 200,000 years old. Many scientists have devoted their lives to understanding how architecture, social structure, and language have changed over this history. Yet we know almost nothing about the history of human minds. Behavioral science research has instead focused nearly exclusively on contemporary people, and psychological theories often draw from taxonomies that assume a culturally and historically stable structure to emotion, personality, morality, and other psychological processes. In this talk, Joshua Conrad Jackson surveys new insights into how psychological processes may have changed over human history in ways that challenge these taxonomical models.

This talk is part of a long-term initiative, a Research Focus Group called “Emotions in History” organized by Professors Ya Zuo (History) and Hongbo Yu (Psychological and Brain Sciences). Led by a historian and a psychologist, our group aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between psychologists and humanists and to foster genuine collaboration among scholars who study emotions from different traditions of inquiry.