Joshua Conrad Jackson is a postdoctoral research fellow at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He studies how history and culture affect the way humans think and behave.
Humans turn to the supernatural to explain both natural and social phenomena when we can’t point to a clear human cause. But supernatural explanations are more common for natural than for social phenomena. Why?
Should we expect people around the world to conceptualize emotions, like “love” or “hate,” the same way, simply because we can point to a translation in a dictionary?