Mike and his lab are hoping to recruit one (or possibly two) new PhD students for Fall 2027. For the next five years, they will be tackling two challenges. First, they will be researching the causes and consequences of envy. Second, they will be researching the causal influence of religious cognition, emotion, and behavior on cooperation and prosocial behavior.
Throughout this work, they plan to develop formal computational models in a way that helps scientists to improve their theories of these important phenomena.
For more information and to apply, visit the UCSD Psychology department’s website.
How does our evolutionary past shed light on how we think, feel, and behave in the present?
Michael McCullough is an experimental psychologist who is concerned primarily with the evolutionary and cognitive underpinnings of human sociality. He was one of the first scientists to take an interest in interpersonal forgiveness and to develop tools for studying it experimentally. He has also innovated experimental approaches to studying gratitude, revenge, prosocial behavior, religious cognition, and intertemporal choice. Additionally, he has worked in recent years to help clear up scientific puzzles about self-control and the social effects of a hormone known as oxytocin.
CV | UCSD | Google Scholar
Latest Book
The Kindness of Strangers
How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code
“A fine achievement. McCullough expertly braids together the distinctive strands of evolutionary psychology, history, and philosophy to explore and explain a characteristic unique to our stage of development: kindness to strangers. An important book that looks at the whole of human history, and more, and thereby offers a valuable counterweight to the all-to-common view that everything is getting worse.”
Highlights
Highlights
