Culturomics and the concept of harmony between humans and nature
Event Title
International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology
Location
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
Start Date
15-5-2025 2:30 PM
End Date
15-5-2025 3:00 PM
Language
English
Description
Climate change and human sustainability represent major global challenges that require collaborative solutions through interdisciplinary integration of psychology, earth sciences, environmental sciences, computational sciences, anthropology, and more. While culture serves as a vital mechanism for human adaptation to nature, prior cultural research has largely adopted a reductionist perspective, focusing on isolated scales and single-dimensional features. We propose a cross-scale, interdisciplinary research framework of Culturomics to understand and explore culture from a systems science perspective and investigate the link between climate change and the evolution of human culture and civilization. Grounded in the traditional Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一), our research integrates agent-based modeling, historical ethnographic analysis, cross-cultural assessments, psychological and behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging techniques. In combination with advanced analytical tools such as large language models and representational similarity analysis, this project aims to reveal how weather variability shapes human cultural values by altering adaptive environmental behaviors, and to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms, neural substrates, and evolutionary patterns.
Document Type
Presentation
Recommended Citation
Luo, S. (2025, May 15). Culturomics and the concept of harmony between humans and nature. Presented at the International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Culturomics and the concept of harmony between humans and nature
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
Climate change and human sustainability represent major global challenges that require collaborative solutions through interdisciplinary integration of psychology, earth sciences, environmental sciences, computational sciences, anthropology, and more. While culture serves as a vital mechanism for human adaptation to nature, prior cultural research has largely adopted a reductionist perspective, focusing on isolated scales and single-dimensional features. We propose a cross-scale, interdisciplinary research framework of Culturomics to understand and explore culture from a systems science perspective and investigate the link between climate change and the evolution of human culture and civilization. Grounded in the traditional Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一), our research integrates agent-based modeling, historical ethnographic analysis, cross-cultural assessments, psychological and behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging techniques. In combination with advanced analytical tools such as large language models and representational similarity analysis, this project aims to reveal how weather variability shapes human cultural values by altering adaptive environmental behaviors, and to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms, neural substrates, and evolutionary patterns.
Additional Information
Speaker
Siyang LUO (Sun Yat-sen University, China)
Associate Professor and Ph.D. supervisor in the Department of Psychology at Sun Yat-sen University, and Director of the Social Culture and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. His primary research areas include: 1) Computational Cultural Neuroscience: Investigating the co-evolutionary processes among natural environments, genetic foundations, and sociocultural contexts, and exploring how cultural change impacts social behavior. 2) Social Affective Neuroscience: Exploring the neural mechanisms underlying complex emotional and behavioral processes such as empathy, trust and betrayal, conformity, deception, and death anxiety. 3) Interdisciplinary Science for Human Sustainability: Conducting cross-scale integrative research that combines geographic environmental data, ecological and biological data, and sociocultural-psychological data. His research has been published in leading international and domestic journals, including Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Social Science & Medicine, Globalization and Health, NeuroImage, British Journal of Social Psychology, and Acta Psychologica Sinica. Some of his work has been selected as ESI Top 1% Highly Cited Papers and ESI Top 0.1% Hot Papers, and has been positively cited by top-tier journals such as The Lancet. He is currently Secretary-General of the Social Psychology Division of the Chinese Psychological Society. He also serves as a peer reviewer for NSFC, international reviewer for the Singapore National Medical Research Council, youth editorial board member for The Innovation, editorial board member of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and BMC Psychology, and reviewer for more than 30 academic journals.