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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.