About
This workshop has both broad and specific goals. Broadly, we aim to explore and develop the field of historical psychology, emphasizing the use of historical texts, historical databases and other data sources to measure aspects of psychology/culture and test hypotheses about psychological and cultural change. Specifically, we are interested in the hypothesis that the successful diffusion of political, legal, and economic institutions is influenced by people’s social organization and their psychology. When less constrained by strong kin networks, people develop psychologies that are more individualistic, analytic, and non-conformist. These ways of thinking nurture impersonal rule-following, liberty, free markets, and increasingly democratic societies anchored around individual rights. This approach highlights the importance of understanding long-run developments within a broader co-evolutionary context that incorporates the role of informal norms, religion, kinship, and historical psychology.
Our workshop takes a comparative approach and aims to explore new research directions and methodologies to gain deeper insights into these questions. One such methodological focus will be on computational textual approaches, and their ability to trace historical psychology and kinship systems over space and time. By assembling a group of outstanding researchers across various academic disciplines, we aim to foster a diverse exchange of approaches and knowledge, enriching our understanding of the roles played by religion, kinship, and psychology for economic and institutional development over time. By drawing lessons from the past, we seek to gain valuable insights that will inform our understanding of the future.
Program
Welcome & Introduction — Joe Henrich
Session 1: Kinship and Psychology in Europe
- Bernhard Jussen (Goethe University Frankfurt) — “Kinship in Latin Europe from Peasant to UrbanizedSocieties (6th to 15th c). Consensus, Dissent, andthe Categories of Observation”
- Slava Savitskiy (Harvard) — “Medieval ChurchExposure, WEIRD Psychology, and Innovation”
Session 2: Kinship and Psychology Comparatively
- Guido Tabellini (Bocconi University) & Joel Mokyr (Northwestern) — “Institutional and Cultural Bifurcation: The Great Divergence Between China and Europe” — Slides
- Jennifer Devereaux (Harvard) — “Isonymy in the Roman World: Epigraphic Evidence”
Session 3: Europe Through the Ages
- David de la Croix (UCLouvain) — “63,000 European University Professors and Academicians: Human Capital, Mobility, Families, and Religion from 1000 CE to 1800 CE” — Slides
- Vicky Fouka (Stanford University) and Valentín Figueroa (PUC Chile) — “Structural Transformation and Value Change: The British Abolitionist Movement”
- Jeanet Bentzen (University of Copenhagen) — “In the Name of God! Religiosity and the Emergence of Modern Science and Growth” — Slides
Session 4: Cultural Economics and Historical Psychology
- Max Posch (Exeter) — “Cultural Change: Evidence from Three Centuries of U.S. Local Newspapers” — Slides
- Martin Fiszbein (Boston University) — “America’s Frontier Culture: A Particular(ist) Individualism”
- Melanie Meng Xue (LSE) — “Values of China”
Session 5: Tools and Techniques
- Tim Geelhaar (Bielefeld University) & Patrick Burns (NYU) — “Conceptual and Methodological Prerequisites for Text Mining on Historical Corpora. Corpus Building and Work Flow Aspects”
- Michael Muthukrishna (LSE) — “Data Bank on Religious History”
Session 6: Textual Data
- David Smith (Northeastern) — “Artificial Intelligence as an Archival Science: From Manuscript Collation with OCR Models to Cultural Circulation in Newspapers” — Slides
- Mohammad Atari (UMass Amherst), Patrick Burns (NYU), Pramit Chaudhuri (UT Austin), Jennifer Devereaux (Harvard), and Joseph Dexter (Harvard) — “Natural Language Processing for Historical Psychology with Deep Diachronic Corpora”