Joshua Conrad Jackson

Joshua Conrad Jackson is an assistant professor of Behavioral Science at the Booth School of Business, where he teaches strategies and processes of negotiation.

In his research, Josh studies how culture co-evolves with psychology. He is interested in how culture has shaped the mind throughout human history, and how it continues to shape human futures. His studies consider the deep past, uncovering how historical patterns of migration, warfare, and urbanization have influenced human emotion, moral psychology, and religion. He also examines how contemporary trends like the rise of algorithms, climate change, and economic inequality could impact people’s beliefs, values, and prejudices.

Many public policy issues lie at the intersection of cultural evolution and psychology, and Josh tries to highlight these connections to policy. He has published papers explaining why support for political leaders surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, why populist leaders swept through Europe in the early 21st century, and how social media algorithms could contribute to political polarization and false beliefs.

Josh has published papers in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Annual Review of Psychology. He has also written for Huffington Post, LA Times, and Scientific American. He won the Sage Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Dissertation Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Cross-Cultural Research’s John and Beatrice Whiting Award for Outstanding Graduate Student.

Before joining Booth, Josh was a DRRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He has also worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Josh earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in social psychology, and his B.A. from McGill University in Psychology and East Asian History.