🚨New paper on "Psychology as a historical science" w/ @JoHenrich & @slingerland20 in Annual Review of Psychology. Catalyzing the field of "historical psychology" by reviewing work on: origins of psychology and institutions today, psychology of the past (data from dead minds) 1/

Our psychology is shaped by our societies, and our societies are shaped by their histories. We can do better than butterfly collecting--just measuring cross-cultural diffs. For psychology to develop a full theory of human behavior, we need historical psychology. 2/

Psychology is shaped by millions of years of genetic evolution, thousands of years of cultural evolution, & a short lifetime of experience; yet, much of the field has focused on that short lifetime of experience. The WEIRD People Problem is not only about geography but history 3/

Past societies can be as culturally distant as distant societies. Cohort effects are a sliver of the cross-temporal variation we would expect in a culturally evolving species. History serves as a kind of psychological fossil record, a source of "data from dead minds". 4/

We (1) review work in historical psychology; (2) introduce methods including causal inference & how to extract data from dead minds; (3) explore the role of theory in mapping history to psychology; and (4) provide some conclusions concerning the future of this field. 5/