The Language, Cognition and Culture Lab at Auckland University

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...

Why I wrote this essay, plus a table of contents

28/04/2025

!!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 -

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...

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...

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. ...

19/06/2023

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 -

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 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 -

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

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