Joe Henrich

Building a Program in Culture and Cognition. Funded by NSF Anthropology for 5 years. Aim is to understand the ontogeny of culture through a detailed study of cultural learning using in-depth ethnography, social networks, and experiments in Fijian villages. [Website]

The Origins of Prosociality. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation The projects involves a comparative study of prosocial behavior in chimpanzees and human children in order to illuminate the phylogeny and ontogeny of social behavior. Collaborative work with Joan Silk, Sarah Brosnan, Daniel Povinelli, and Jennifer Vonk.

Folksociology: A cross-cultural and developmental investigation of how groups influence thinking about individuals. Funded by the Social Science Research Coucil. Human social life is dominated by groups. Clans, clubs, castes and guilds, along with a constellation of other groups, shape all aspects of human life, from trade and cooperation to marriage and child-rearing. Casual observation suggests that not all kinds of groups are equally salient and durable. Some groups, ethnic and racial groups in particular, seem to stand out in their ability to variously motivate in-group trust and out-group oppression. Our project team aims to probe the psychological foundations of how people in very different societies think about ethnic and racial groups, whether such groups evoke different patterns of inferences vis-à-vis other social groups, and how these patterns develop in children.