Themes
People’s beliefs and perceptions can be fundamentally reshaped by their historical and cultural context. This assumption draws from constructionist theories of psychology, in which socially transmitted conceptual knowledge is embedded in basic psychological processes like feeling emotion and judging right from wrong. We draw from cultural evolutionary models to formalize how this process of social transmission works. The lab’s work has contributed to the emerging field of “historical psychology,” which uses formal theory and computational methods to understand how the mind has changed over time.
Jackson, J. C., Atari, M. (2025). Historical Psychology: How the events of yesterday shaped the minds of today. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 9, 100247.
Yam, K. C., Jackson, J. C., Hoon, T., Gray, K., Shariff, A. (2023). Cultural differences in people’s reactions and applications of robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Management and Organization Review, 19(5), 859-875.
Lindquist, K. L., Jackson, J. C., Leshin, J., Satpute, A. B., Gendron, M. (2022). The cultural evolution of emotion. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 669-681.
Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T., List, J. M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P., Greenhill, S., Gray, R., Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366(6472), 1517-1522.
Brewer, J., Gelfand, M., Jackson, J. C., MacDonald, I., Peregrine, P. N., Richerson, P. J., Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., Wilson, D. S. (2017). Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution. Nature: Ecology & Evolution, 1(1), 0070.
One branch of the lab’s work focuses on how people adapt to living in “societies of strangers,” cultural groups where size and mobility increase the rate of anonymous interactions. In a number of projects, we show how humans develop stronger social norms in these societies, especially when they face ecological threats that increase the value of coordination. We consistently find that larger-scale societies have stronger social norms. We believe this happens because people grow more concerned with norm violations as societies grow, and when large-scale societies face new threats like conflict or natural disaster. Our experiments have found that, when facing these concerns, people are more likely to support political executives who can enforce law and order, and they are more likely to ascribe punitive and controlling qualities to deities. We also show that strong social norms may indeed be adaptive for promoting coordination and cooperation when large-scale societies face threats, as evidenced through cross-cultural variation in case and death rates in the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent work on this topic emphasizes the role of institutions like government, religion, ritual, and kinship in managing norm enforcement and cooperation in large-scale societies.
Marji, M., Jackson, J. C., Miller, K. J., Suresh, S., Huang, W., Liu, A. Y., Andresen, C., Pompey, C., Halberstadt, J., Niedenthal, P. (2026). Identity fusion with proximal but not distal social groups rises after mastering a coordinated marching routine. Royal Society Open Science, 13(3), 251975.
Liu, S., Zhu, J., Liu, Y., Wilbanks, D., Jackson, J. C., Mu, Y. (2022). Perception of strong social norms during the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to positive psychological outcomes. BMC Public Health, 22, 1403.
Jackson, J. C., Caluori, N. E., Abrams, S., Beckman, E., Gelfand, M., Gray, K. (2021). Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(10), 2057-2077.
Gelfand, M. J., Jackson, J. C., Pan, X., Nau, D., Pieper, D., Denison, E., Dagher, M., Van Lange, P., Chiu, C. Y., Wang, M. (2021). The relationship between cultural tightness-looseness and COVID-19 cases and deaths: A global analysis. Lancet: Planetary Health, 5(3), e135-e144.
Caluori, N., Jackson, J. C., Gray, K., Gelfand, M. (2020). Conflict changes how people view God. Psychological Science, 31(3), 280-292.
Yam, K. C., Jackson, J. C., Barnes, C. M., Lau, T., Qin, X., Lee, H. Y. (2020). The rise of COVID-19 cases is associated with support for world leaders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(41), 25429-25433.
Gelfand, M., Caluori, N., Jackson, J. C., Taylor, M. (2020). The cultural evolutionary trade-off of ritualistic synchrony. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375(1805), 20190432.
Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M. J., Ember, C. (2020). A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1930), 20201036.
Skoggard, I., Ember, C., Pitek, E., Jackson, J. C., Carulus, C. (2020). Resource stress predicts changes in religious belief and increases in sharing behavior. Human Nature, 31(3), 249-271.
Jackson, J. C., Choi, V., Gelfand, M. J. (2019). Revenge: A multilevel review and synthesis. Annual Review of Psychology, 70(1), 319-345.
Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M. J., 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), 244-250.
Jackson, J. C., von Egmond, M., Choi, V., Ember, C., Halberstadt, J., Balanovic, J., Basker, I., Boehnke, K., Buki, N., Fischer, R., Fulop, M., Fulmer, A., Homan, A., van Kleef, G., Schei, V., Szabo, E., Ward, C., Gelfand, M. (2019). Ecological and cultural factors underlying the global distribution of prejudice. PLOS ONE, 14(9), e0221953.
Jackson, J. C., Jong, J., Bilkey, D., Whitehouse, H., Zollmann, S., McNaughton, C., Halberstadt, J. (2018). Synchrony and physiological arousal increase cohesion and cooperation in large naturalistic groups. Scientific Reports, 8, 127.
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.
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.
Our lab also studies how living in “societies of strangers” can reshape people’s psychological concepts, promoting the reliance on abstract, decontextualized concepts like “morality,” which guide our social inferences. People today use these concepts when they speak about how their neighbor is “extraverted” or their friend is often “angry,” but these kinds of categories are often vast oversimplifications of social behavior. We have shown that these kinds of oversimplifications become more adaptive in larger social networks, where people rarely encounter social information about their partners. Once people begin communicating through these concepts, they become entrenched in language, where they guide explicit beliefs about how people behave. These dynamics have become a significant focus of our lab’s ongoing work.
Miton, H., Jackson, J. C. (2026). Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 30(2), 124-135.
Liu, Y., Charlesworth, T., Koch, A., Luttrell, A., Jackson, J. C. (2026). The content, structure, and evolution of English trait words. In press at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Dillion, D., Liu, Y., Chen, Y., Watts, J., Zhao, C., Baral, S., Buckner, W., Atari, M., Kteily, N., Jackson, J. C. (2024). Prejudice tied to state centralization in historical societies. Under review
Jackson, J. C., Halberstadt, J., Tazezawa, M., Liew, K., Smith, K., Apicella, C., Gray, K. (2023). Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(6), 1207-1238.
In addition to becoming larger and more anonymous, social networks have also become increasingly connected. How has this interconnection rewired cultural variation? One prediction from classic modernization theories was a mass cultural convergence, in which all countries adopted the values, technologies, and political systems of wealthy Western nations. The reality has been more complicated. Whereas some technologies and demographic trends have converged, values and political preferences have remained distinct across regions, and even diverged in some cases. One major theme of our lab’s work is seeking to understand the persistence of cultural diversity in a globalized world using formal models of cultural evolution.
Jackson, J. C., Liu, Y., Kteily, N. (2026). The widening partisan gap in legislative support for civil rights in the United States. Nature Communications, 17, 6833.
Jackson, J. C., & Medvedev, D. (2024). Worldwide divergence of values. Nature Communications, 15(1), 2650.
In the 21st century, many social networks have shifted to online spaces. Billions of people now belong to online social networks where they debate politics, technology, and lifestyles. Over the last several years, our lab has co-developed a theory of “algorithm-mediated social learning” to explain why these online spaces often seem to be moralized, emotional, and divisive. Our theory emphasizes the role of algorithms, which selectively promote attention-capturing information on newsfeeds. This process distorts users’ perceptions of social norms, leading people to think that toxicity and outrage are more common than they actually are, and to feel pressured to contribute this content. This process converges with other distinct mechanisms, such as the drive to contribute unique content, to foster a drift toward negative and outrage-laden discourse over time. To address this trend, we have also developed field interventions, including one algorithm that reduced toxicity during the 2024 presidential election by promoting a more representative set of voices.
Another emerging topic in the lab concerns how we can best foster innovation in online social networks. In other words, how can we make online social networks places where people come up with new and promising ideas, as well as places where people treat each other with kindness and respect? We are currently doing research that combines network science with our theory of algorithm-mediated social learning to answer this question.
Brady, W. J., Yu, C. W., Ornstein, N., Sun, B., Jackson, J. C. (2027). Artificial intelligence systems distort upstream selection in human social learning. Current Opinion in Psychology, 73, 102412.
Mao, H., Leong, Y. C., Jiang, Y., Koch, A., Brady, W. J., Jackson, J. C. (2026). Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(26), e2527316123.
Jackson, J. C., Liu, Y., Wang, Z., Brady, W. J. (2026). Large AI models have a prioritization problem: Policy implications and solutions. Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13(1), 5-13.
Brady, W. J., Doyle, M., Elnakouri, A., Finkel, E., Jackson, J. C., Kteily, N., Parker, V., Puryear, C., Spelman, T., Teeny, J., Torres, M. (2026). Redesigning algorithms to intervene on social norm misperceptions during a national election. Nature, 655, 942-956.
Brady, W. J., Jackson, J. C., Doyle, M., Baier, S. (2026). Engagement-based algorithms disrupt human social norm learning. In revision at Nature Communications
Puryear, C., Brady, W. J., Jackson, J. C., Leong, Y. C., Mao, H., Kteily, N. (2026). Rising moralization in social media discourse. In revision at Nature Human Behaviour
Brady, W. J., Jackson, J. C., Lindström, B., Crockett, M. J. (2023). Algorithm-mediated social learning in online social networks. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(10), 947-960.
Yam, K. C., Tang, P., Jackson, J. C., Su, R., Gray, K. (2023). The rise of robots increases job insecurity and maladaptive behaviors: Multi-method evidence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(5), 850-870.
Jackson, J. C., Yam, K. C., Tang, P., Liu, T., Shariff, A. (2023). Exposure to robot preachers undermines religious commitment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(12), 3344-3358.
Jackson, J. C., Yam, K. C., Tang, P., Sibley, C., Waytz, A. (2023). Exposure to automation explains religious declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(34), e2304748120.