My major research goal is to understand the transmissive and coordinative features of Chinese thought and culture, and their influence on emotion, cognition, and behavior across the generations, by using whatever scientific and philosophical methods needed. This goal has gained importance in an interconnected world in which China's influence is paramount and growing. A major obstacle in understanding and appraising the influence of Chinese culture is the lack of integration between the Humanities and Social Sciences. I pin hopes for an emergent explanatory unity on development of cultural evolutionary theory.

Understanding influences of, and influences on, Chinese culture, animates areas of current research. In cultural evolutionary theory, Henrike Moll, Jake Mackey and I authored a series of long-form critical reviews of major recent works (by K. Laland, M. Tomasello, and C. Heyes) in an attempt to heighten the theoretical acumen of interdisciplinary explanation in this thriving field. With the help of a Borchard Foundation grant, Dr. Moll and I gathered gathering together leaders in the field of cultural evolution at a chateau in Brittany in the summer of 2022 for a pre-read workshop about explanatory mechanisms in this field. In data science and Humanities computing, Kristoffer Nielbo, Ted Slingerland, Uffe Bergeton and I have conducted several machine learning projects with a large corpus of influential historical Chinese documents in an effort to resolve canonical interpretive issues in history of philosophy and to understand complex interactions between culture and cognition. I recently completed a project that brought together into a workshop renown China researchers in Philosophy, Social Psychology, Cultural Neuroscience, Law, Anthropology, Developmental Psychology, Literature and more in an effort to understand Chinese morality and its varied causes and effects. Our book, The Routledge International Handbook of Morality, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in China, is now out. As of January 2023 I’m at work on two projects. One is a project that is bringing together a dozen cultural evolutionary researchers in a series of online meetings in order to improve work broadly in the philosophy of science of cultural evolution. The other, also collaborative, is a project attempting to understand aspects of agency in relation to free will, religion, and culture. Several experiments and data science explorations are underway.

I’ve led with a description of research done in collaboration because learning from and working with world-leading experts gives me the best opportunity to generate cultural evolutionary understanding of Chinese thought and culture in the remainder of my lifetime. In addition to these collaborative projects though I also write and publish solo articles in the same areas of inquiry. By Fall 2021 I completed a series of four articles examining components of what psychologists refer to as ‘East Asian cognitive style’. This included three ‘applied’ studies demonstrating unique-making features of East Asian cognitive style at work in the Book of Changes, in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and, with Nick Jones, in the sinification of Buddhism. Another paper comprehensively reviews experimental evidence for the cross-cultural variability of cognitive style. In Spring 2022 I finished two papers that sought out the most plausible evidence-based explanation of footbinding I could. “Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handicraft Labor” is an extraordinarily critical, step-by-step methodological evaluation of purportedly scientific publications advocating a ‘labor market’ theory of footbinding. The other publication presented an agent-based model in the context adjudicating between the labor market theory and an evolutionary social sciences theory of footbinding. This paper is co-authored with Laura Chowdhury and Yile Zhang.