Joseph Watts is doctoral student at the University of Auckland working towards a PhD in cultural evolution. He is currently building a database of Austronesian cultures which will be used to test evolutionary explanations of religious belief and practice.

Joseph Watts is a Research Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand as well as an External Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He works on how cultural, cognitive, and evolutionary processes interact to shape the way that people think about and interact with the world. Much of his research uses cross-cultural comparative methods to test theories about the cultural evolution of religious systems in human history.

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Authored by Joseph Watts

April 6, 2015

Did Fear In Supernatural Punishment Build Complex Societies?

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April 11, 2016

Why did early human societies practice violent human sacrifice?

Is is possible that human sacrifice might have served some social function, and actually benefited at least some members of a society?

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