Humans are not what we used to be. Trade, warfare, disease, natural hazards, and technology have changed human culture dramatically, and culture continues to change today. My central line of research is devoted to understanding how cultural, environmental, and technological change influences human cognition and decision-making. I use dual inheritance models of cultural evolution to pursue these questions, and work with a variety of methods from linguistics, anthropology, and computer science. Below I have listed some of my representative papers in this area.
My current lines of research in this area focus on (a) the impact of rising urbanization and population size on religious belief and moral cognition, (b) historical changes in emotion concepts, and (c) the environmental and structural causes of intergroup conflict and polarization throughout history.
global supernatural explanations
Jackson, J. C., Wilbanks, D., Bastian, B., Watts, J., DiMaggio, N., Gray, K. (2023). Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena. Nature Human Behavior.
How Culture influences Views of God
Jackson, J. C., Abrams, S., Beckman, E., Gelfand, M., Gray, K. (2021). Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Cultural variance in small-Scale Societies
Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M., Ember, C. (2020). A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1930).
Conflict changes how people view god
Caluori. N., Jackson, J. C., Gray, K., Gelfand, M. (2020). Conflict changes how people view God. Psychological Science, 31(3), 280-292.
A global analysis of emotion Meaning
Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P., Greenhill, S., Gray, R., Lindquist, K. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366(6472), 1517-1522.
How Ecology and Culture Shape Prejudice
Jackson, J. C., van Egmond, M., Choi, V. K., Ember, C. R., Halberstadt, J., Balanovic, J., ... & Fulop, M. (2019). Ecological and cultural factors underlying the global distribution of prejudice. PloS one, 14(9), e0221953.
American culture is Loosening
Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M., De, S., & Fox, A. (2019). The loosening of American culture over 200 years is associated with a creativity–order trade-off. Nature human behaviour, 3(3), 244.
Divine Intervention and passive immorality
Jackson, J. C., & Gray, K. (2019). When a good god makes bad people: Testing a theory of religion and immorality. Journal of personality and social psychology.
the culture and psychology of revenge
Jackson, J. C., Choi, V. K., & Gelfand, M. J. (2019). Revenge: A multilevel review and synthesis. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 319-345.
How do Christians see the face of god?
Jackson, J. C., Hester, N., & Gray, K. (2018). The faces of God in America: Revealing religious diversity across people and politics. PloS one, 13(6), e0198745.
Morality predicts who we see as immortal
Gray, K., Anderson, S., Doyle, C. M., Hester, N., Schmitt, P., Vonasch, A. J., ... & Jackson, J. C. (2018). To be immortal, do good or evil. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(6), 868-880.
Does religion reduce death anxiety?
Jackson, J. C., Jong, J., Bluemke, M., Poulter, P., Morgenroth, L., & Halberstadt, J. (2018). Testing the causal relationship between religious belief and death anxiety. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(1), 57-68.
Reviewing Tightness-looseness theory
Gelfand, M. J., Harrington, J. R., & Jackson, J. C. (2017). The strength of social norms across human groups. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 800-809.
encouraging cultural evolution science
Brewer, J., Gelfand, M., Jackson, J. C., MacDonald, I. F., Peregrine, P. N., Richerson, P. J., ... & Wilson, D. S. (2017). Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution. Nature ecology & evolution, 1(3), 0070.
Reviewing the science of cultural norms
Gelfand, M. J., & Jackson, J. C. (2016). From one mind to many: the emerging science of cultural norms. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 175-181.
Personality mediates religious homogamy
Jackson, J., Halberstadt, J., Jong, J., & Felman, H. (2015). Perceived openness to experience accounts for religious homogamy. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(6), 630-638.