Claire White

Claire White is a Professor at the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. Her research explains why some ideas and behaviors recur cross-culturally, such as grief rituals. She is also interested in the relationship between religion and well-being. Her approach is interdisciplinary and grounded in the cognitive sciences.​​

Harvey Whitehouse

Harvey Whitehouse is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the evolution of social complexity. One of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, Harvey is well known for his theory of “modes of religiosity,” which explains how the frequency and emotional intensity of collective rituals influence the scale and structure of religious organizations.

He is Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College. For more information about Harvey’s work, please visit harveywhitehouse.com. He is Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, where he did his graduate work with Professor Jack Goody, on memory and oral literature. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon on the transmission of the Fang oral epics and on Fang traditional religion. Since then he has worked mostly on the experimental study of cognitive capacities underling cultural transmission, particularly in the domain of religious beliefs and behaviors.

Pascal Boyer is the author of Religion explained (2001) and Minds Make Societies (2018). After teaching in Cambridge, San Diego, Lyon and Santa Barbara, P Boyer moved to his present position as Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University, St. Louis. P Boyer is also a research affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography of Oxford University, where he collaborates with Professor Harvey Whitehouse.

Ronald Fischer obtained his PhD in psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. He currently works in the Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics Unit at D’Or Institute for Research & Education, Brazil and the Pioneer Science Initiative. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society NZ Te Aparangi and the Association for Psychological Science. His research focuses on cultural and evolutionary dynamics of human values, beliefs, personality and mental health. He has published more than 200 articles and book chapters and has been named in the top 10 of the most highly cited researchers on culture and psychology.

Melanie Nyhof is an associate professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College. She earned a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and has held positions at Northwestern College, Indiana University South Bend, Fuller School of Graduate Studies, and Oxford University. Her research examines cognition and culture from a developmental perspective. She has researched understanding of illness, afterlife beliefs, rituals, and religion among different religious and cultural groups, in the US, Indonesia, China, and Puerto Rico. She has expertise in conducting cross-cultural research with different age groups using multiple methodologies including interviews, surveys, and ethnographic methods.

Melanie Nyhof is an associate professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College. She earned a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and has held positions at Northwestern College, Indiana University South Bend, Fuller School of Graduate Studies, and Oxford University. Her research examines cognition and culture from a developmental perspective. She has researched understanding of illness, afterlife beliefs, rituals, and religion among different religious and cultural groups, in the US, Indonesia, China, and Puerto Rico. She has expertise in conducting cross-cultural research with different age groups using multiple methodologies including interviews, surveys, and ethnographic methods.

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the cognitive and social functions of cultural practices such as ritual, sports, and music. To study those practices, which he studies by combining participatory and experimental methods in real-life settings. He has conducted several years of fieldwork in Southern Europe and Mauritius, and continues to go to the field each year.

His award-winning book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, has been published in ten languages.

Sevgi Demiroğlu studied language and literature at Boğaziçi University and Society and Culture at IIT Gandhinagar before joining UConn’s Experimental Anthropology Lab to study the intersections of religion, culture, and cognition. She has worked with self-flagellants in India on sacred pain perception, earthquake survivors in Turkey on coping and prosociality, and adherents in Mauritius on misfortune. She is now exploring the impact of spiritual beliefs and rituals on well-being and social cohesion in the Torajan community of South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Ali Giritlioglu’s research is mainly centered around the effects of inter and intrasexual selective forces on human behavior both on the individual and societal level, in the context of modern and pre-modern societies, taking into consideration the insights of evolutionary psychology/psychiatry, human behavioral ecology, and cultural evolution. He is currently employed as a researcher in the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

Hannah Lunkenheimer, PhD, is a mixed-methods researcher with expertise in study design and data analysis. She investigates human behavior, health, and social systems to generate insights that support evidence-informed decision-making and advance social outcomes. Hannah is currently a Quantitative Specialist at OMNI Institute. 

Dr Lukas Reinhardt is researcher specializing in global identity and social cohesion on a global scale. He is also a research affiliate at the Identity and Conflict Lab at Yale University and has conducted his doctoral studies at the Department of Economics at the University of Cologne.

Lukas was a visiting scholar at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). His research focuses on analysing the causal effectiveness of strategies aiming at strengthening global identity and global cohesion in order to mitigate conflict and facilitate cooperation on pressing global problems. He leads the Global Cohesion Lab within the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

Dimas Iqbal Romadhon is a medical anthropologist focusing on health seeking behaviors surrounding infectious diseases. He has worked broadly in the western region of Indonesia and has published on the issues of leprosy folktales and the construction of stigma, porcine-contaminated vaccine hesitancy, and the political construction of Indonesia’s national health insurance. As a postdoctoral research fellow in the Integrative Anthropology Lab at UC Davis, he is currently studying the social and cognitive dynamics surrounding explanations of misfortune, with a particular interest in the interaction between local beliefs and biomedical narratives about malaria among indigenous Mentawai communities in West Sumatra, Indonesia.