The Language, Cognition and Culture Lab is run by evolutionists Nichola Raihani, Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray at the University of Auckland.
05/11/2025
-- !Publication update! --
LCC Lab director Quentin Atkinson's piece on "How not to run a university" is now available online. The piece provides a case study of one university's managerial misadventures, why it is happening and what we can do about it...
Preface and Contents Why I wrote this essay, plus a table of contents
!!NEW ARTICLE AVAILABLE ONLINE!! Our new piece just out in Current Anthropology on the dual foundations of political ideology across human social life -
26/03/2025
Two Fully-Funded PhD positions at !
Come help us understand the past and future of global cultural and linguistic diversity.
https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/understanding-the-past-and-future-of-global-cultural-and-linguistic-diversity/?p183755
25/03/2025
New data and methods from a team lead by LCC lab members show that tool use isn't as rare as we thought among parrots -
Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare Exotic species behavior; Animals; Animal science
11/09/2024
Is politics all just self-interested alliances between groups? Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson argue that it's more complicated than that...
It’s More Complicated Than That—Alliances Are One of Many Factors Shaping Political Belief Systems Published in Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory (Vol. 34, No. 3, 2023)
11/09/2024
New paper on political instability in Vanuatu in Anthropological Forum with LCC Lab affiliate Guy Lavender Forsyth...
A Brief History of Political Instability in Vanuatu Vanuatu has largely avoided the political violence seen elsewhere in Melanesia in the recent past. It has a small but successful tourist economy, based on its selling point as a tropical paradise. ...
PhD Scholarships available on cognition and culture in New Caledonian Crows. If you're interested, check out the full ad below. To discuss other PhD opportunities on cultural diversity, the psychology of politics, religion and climate change, email me at [email protected]
17/05/2023
NEW PAPER! Climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour more likely among those who cooperate with strangers in lab-based social dilemmas that make no mention of climate change or any other real world social dilemma -
Climate change believers are more likely to cooperate with strangers, new research finds Belief in climate change seems to be linked to willingness to cooperate for the common good. This suggests there may be ways to bridge ideological divides to combat complex problems.
21/04/2023
Out this week in Science Advances, our long-awaited Grambank paper, documenting global variation in grammar across 2400 languages. 10 years' work by an amazing team - too many to thank them all (95 in the author list) or to try to articulate the many invaluable contributions. Please read the paper and use the data. We have to protect the treasure that is the world's linguistic diversity -
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss Grambank reveals global patterns in linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss.
16/11/2022
New paper in Nature Human Behaviour...How do religious and political authority co-evolve and which comes first? We take a look across Austronesian-speaking communities of the Pacific -
Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies - Nature Human Behaviour Phylogenetic methods applied to ethnographic data show that systems of religious and political authority have worked synergistically over millennia of Austronesian cultural evolution, without showing a clear tendency to become more or less distinct.
26/09/2022
Out NOW in Evolutionary Human Sciences, we find evidence to suggest that democratic outcomes diffuse more readily between linguistic and religious relatives. If we want to spread democracy, we need to consider culture...
Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy
27/07/2022
New paper in Nature Scientific Reports showing cooperation in abstract lab-based tasks predicts climate change beliefs and pro-environmental behaviour, with LCC Lab members Scott Claessens, Dan Kelly, Quentin Atkinson and colleagues - https://rdcu.be/cSrY7
