Does medieval Catholicism explain differences between cultures to this day? Could our inclination to pay a parking ticket or to donate blood have to do with the historical interaction of the medieval church and kinship structures during the Middle Ages? These questions were addressed by a team of researchers from George Mason University and Harvard University in their study, “The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation.”[1] Dr. Jonathan Schulz and his colleagues propose that part of the psychological variation around the globe can be traced back to the action and diffusion of the Western Church, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, they propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, which promoted small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality. By combining data on 24 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both Church exposure and kinship, the research team found support for these ideas across countries, among European regions, and among individuals from different cultural backgrounds. 

The results were published in 2019 in one of the world’s top academic journals, Science, and received intensive international media coverage. One of the authors, Dr. Jonathan Schulz from George Mason University, will give a zoom talk UT Austin on April 1 to tell us more about the design and the intriguing findings of his research.  

Dr. Jonathan Schulz is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of George Mason University and affiliated with the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.  His research lies at the intersection of psychology, economic history, and development economics. He is particularly interested in the co-evolution of informal and formal institutions, and the role of tight kinship norms for the formation of democratic institutions.  His work has been discussed in major news outlets including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wallstreet Journal, The New Yorker among many others.