Talk of Love: How Culture Matters

Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters.

Human cultural traits-behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other individuals-can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers have developed theoretical models, both verbal and mathematical, to facilitate our understanding of these patterns. Many of the first quantitative models of cultural evolution were modified from existing concepts in theor...

Why Love Matters. How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain by Sue Gerhardt.

Why babyhood rather than childhood? The case that I want to make is that babyhood is much more important to our lives than many people realise. A lot of the behaviour that worries us in later childhood, such as aggression, hyperactivity, obesity, depression and poor school performance, has already been shaped by children’s experiences in babyhood. For those of you who have not studied the scien...

Why Culture Matters Most

This paper presents a very brief overview of my forthcoming book, Why Culture Matters Most, and then discusses one of the implications the proposed framework has for the role that culture plays in supporting free market democracies. The paper first briefly explores why culture – not genes, geography, institutions, or policies – is the key to explaining the differential success of societies. Thi...

Dying matters: let's talk about it.

Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters.

Does the language people use to refer to the self during introspection influence how they think, feel, and behave under social stress? If so, do these effects extend to socially anxious people who are particularly vulnerable to such stress? Seven studies explored these questions (total N = 585). Studies 1a and 1b were proof-of-principle studies. They demonstrated that using non-first-person pro...