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Research

Research Interests

  • The cognitive science of culture and stories.

    1. How does culture, religion, and narrative affect cultural evolution?
    2. By what mechanisms does our mind process and reconstruct various narratives?
    3. How does cultural evolution drive the evolution of narratives?
    4. What is the role of novelty in the evolution of narratives?
    5. How does novelty affect the successful spreading of narratives?

  • Patterns of novel thinking, collaboration, information spreading, and cooperation.

    1. Aim to understand how narrative structures or ritual practices affect these patterns in social/collective/individual cognition.

  • The development of NLP and NLU methods for computational narrative analysis.

    1. Research how concepts from cognitive science, information theory, embedding methods, digital humanities, and network science can help us better understand narratives computationally.

Statement

I plan to improve pro-social and innovative aspects of various communities by understanding their community structure, the effects of common/shared narratives, and cultural/narrative evolution. I also plan to improve and develop novel NLP/NLU methods for narrative analysis to aid in these endeavors.

Current Projects (Any titles are working titles)

  • Article with Anthony (Tony) Beavers on phenomenology, 4E cognition, and the cognitive science of religion (in progress)
  • The Fit Get Fitter: How Cultural Bias and False Cultural Priors Could Help Individuals and Communities Learn More About the World (in progress, poster presented)
  • Information Control and Concurrent Identity Fusion: Uncovering Causal Mechanisms of Identity Fusion and Predicting Extremism Through the Computational Analysis of Large Cultural Datasets (data collection)
  • Sameness entices, but novelty enchants in fanfiction online (preprint on arXiv)

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Labs

Advisors