John Mansfield receives prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant
"Our thoughts about morality, society and spirituality may be deeply personal, but they draw on deep histories of cultural evolution."
On December 9th, 2025, John Mansfield received a European Research Council Consolidator Award for a research project on "Conceptual diversity and the evolution of abstract thought":
Explaining the origins of abstract thoughts, passed down over thousands of generations, has been one of the major challenges faced by anthropologists and archaeologists. This project will develop a method to reconstruct the evolution of abstract concepts, especially spirituality, ethics and social relations. Using linguistic and anthropological data from hundreds of cultural groups, the project will apply new statistical techniques to infer historical trajectories that produced today’s conceptual diversity. The research could substantially expand what we know about the history of human thought, while also highlighting intellectual traditions that are most at threat from globalization.
As stated in UZH News: "This year, the competition for European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants was fiercer than ever. Researchers submitted 3,121 proposals, a 35% jump from last year, leaving just over 11% of applicants successful. The new grantees, representing 44 nationalities, will pursue cutting-edge research in 25 countries across Europe and beyond.
Against this highly competitive backdrop, nine principal investigators and their research groups at the University of Zurich (UZH) secured funding, achieving an impressive success rate of 22%. Three grants went to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, three to the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, two to the Faculty of Medicine and one to a dual-affiliation institute of the Faculty of Medicine an the Faculty of Science.
The ERC awarded 349 Consolidator Grants this year, distributing €728 million to some of Europe’s most promising mid-career researchers. Aimed at researchers seven to twelve years after their PhD, the grants support ambitious research projects and enable grantees to build or strengthen their research teams and consolidate their independent careers." (Barbara Simpson, UZH News, 09.12.2025)