Professor Bradley Franks

Professor Bradley Franks is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. His research explores the interdependence of mind and culture, aiming to develop an approach that acknowledges evolutionary influences while embracing the nuances of cultural variation.

This interdisciplinary and collaborative work integrates insights from cognitive science, philosophy, communication, anthropology, and social psychology, all under the umbrella of evolutionary theory.

Professor Franks earned his first degree in Social Psychology from LSE before completing an MSc and PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral research focused on how people represent knowledge (ie, concepts), and how that representation connects to knowledge and use of language. The core idea was that concepts hold quite limited content which, with appropriate pragmatic processing mechanisms, delivers highly flexible, context-dependent representations of meaning. This core idea of the context-dependence of thinking has stayed with him, played out in different ways. Recent developments reflect a growing interest in evolutionary explanations of mind and social relations. Connecting this to context-dependence seems most likely to involve a situated and embodied approach to cognition and culture.

His current interests lie in understanding cognition through its evolutionary origins and socio-cultural construction. He examines how fundamental cognitive processes like categorisation and concepts relate to action and agency, shaped by evolved but culturally modulated affordances. Communication, in his view, is inherently dialogical, rooted in evolved joint agency and action. These ideas have a range of implications – eg, for:

• Self-construal and agency, which has implications for cooperation (eg, moral behaviour)
• Role of affordances in designing behaviour change interventions in public policy (eg, health)
• Content and cultural transmission in public and mediated communication (eg, media representation of neuroscience)
• Content and cultural transmission in commonsense (eg, conspiracy theory as ‘quasi-religious’)

Expertise

Cognition and culture; evolutionary perspectives; categorisation and concepts; conspiracy theory; agency, self-construal; religion