Staff
Director
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1170
Email: j.bering@qub.ac.uk
Jesse Bering's webpage
Dr. Jesse Bering is a Reader in the School of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture. His postgraduate studies focused on the psychological differences between human beings and chimpanzees, and this early exposure to comparative psychology, combined with his PhD in developmental psychology, led to his work studying how the evolved human mind plays a part in religious thinking. He is the author of numerous scientific articles on topics ranging from the afterlife to university students' conceptions of destiny. His general science writings have appeared widely in popular media outlets. Dr. Bering also writes a featured weekly blog for Scientific American Mind called "Bering in Mind". His first book The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in February, 2011 (in the UK, published as The God Instinct, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, November, 2010).
Assistant Director (Acting Director)
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1170
Email: p.sousa@qub.ac.uk
Porto X-Phi Lab
Paulo's Webpage
Dr. Paulo Sousa is Assistant Director of the ICC and Lecturer in cognitive anthropology in the School of Anthropological Studies. He has participated in many cross-cultural projects and has published numerous articles in the field of cognition and culture. He has also applied an epidemiological approach to the history of ideas of anthropology that has stimulated a major controversy among anthropologists of various traditions. His current research interests focus on agency and moral psychology--in particular, he is writing a book on the folk concept of moral responsibility (in the sense of culpability). He is also associate coordinator of the Porto X-Phi Lab, a laboratory of experimental philosophy whose aim is to develop a research program on agency and moral psychology (see link above).
Distinguished International Fellow
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1170
Email: graham.macdonald@canterbury.ac.nz
Prof. Graham Macdonald is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury. His research interests are primarily in the philosophy of mind, aspects of the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of social science. He co-authored Semantics and Social Science (1980) with Philip Pettit, edited Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A.J.Ayer (1979), and co-edited Fact, Science, and Morality (1986), Philosophy of Psychology and Connectionism (1995), and Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals (2005). Forthcoming work includes two co-edited volumes: McDowell and his Critics (2006), and Teleosemantics: New Philosophical Essays (2006).
Honorary Professor
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1303
Email: t.lawson@qub.ac.uk
Lawson studies the ways in which our ordinary cognitive resources, bequeathed to us by the processes of natural selection, support the generation and transmission of quite complex religious concepts and underwrites the practices associated with them. He views religious ritual acts as by-products of our ordinary cognitive mechanisms, particularly those implicated in theory of mind and agency-detection capacities. He has worked very closely in his research and publications with Robert N. McCauley. At present he has teamed up with Joel Mort to pursue a multi-year, cross-cultural study of precautionary behavior insofar as this is reflected in cultural rituals and precautionary theme preoccupations. The project involves extensive fieldwork in various parts of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. He and Mort have already established field sites in South Africa and are conducting natural and experimental studies there. He has published Religions of Africa: Traditions in Transformation, and, with Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms.
Honorary Professor
Phone: +44 (0) 18 6527 4678
Email: harvey.whitehouse@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Harvey's webpage
Prof. Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, and Honorary Professor in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s. He was the founding Director of the ICC, and has created a complementary institute at Oxford – Centre for Anthropology and Mind. A specialist in Melanesian religion, he carried out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties. His books include: Inside the Cult (1995), Arguments and Icons (2000), and Modes of Religiosity (2004).
Honorary Professor
Phone: (00) 1 902 4237051Email: barkow@dal.ca
Jerome H. Barkow is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Barkow is an anthropologist with a career-long interest in evolution and human behavior, with a particular focus on the adaptations that make it possible for human populations to edit local culture with each generation in a manner that, at least until recently, kept cultural information pools at least somewhat adapted to local conditions. His current research uses commercial films to study the attentional mechanisms involved in socially mediated culture-editing. Among Barkow’s publications is Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture. He is a co-editor, along with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, of The Adapted Mind.
Senior Research Scientist
Email: j.mort@qub.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1314
Dr. Joel Mort (PhD, Western Michigan University) is a Senior Research Fellow at the ICC. In addition he is a Research Scientist in the Cognitive Systems Branch of the US Air Force Research Laboratory and a Research Scholar at the Culture and Cognition Lab in Wright State University's Department of Psychology. Currently he is engaged in two major research projects. His project, Cultural Variations in Vigilance and Precaution Themes (with Prof E. Thomas Lawson) examines (1) inter- and intra-variation of dominant potential danger and precautionary theme preoccupations and the continuity between individual precautionary measures and collective rituals. He is also a core researcher in the AHRC funded Culture and the Mind Project. Research for both projects span sites in S. Africa, Tanzania, USA, UK, and potentially Israel and South East Asia.
Lecturer
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1173
Email: claire.white@qub.ac.uk
Dr Claire White is a temporary lecturer at the ICC. She obtained a BSc in psychology from Queen's University and a PhD from the ICC. Claire has worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and King's College, London. Claire is interested in folk concepts of personal identity and bereavement from the perspectives of cognitive anthroology, experimental psychology and experimental philosophy.
Clerical/Technical Staff
Phone: +44 (0) 28 90 97 3701
Fax: +44 (0) 28 90 97 3700
Email: icc@qub.ac.uk