Research Program: Coevolution, Development, Cognition & Cultural Learning

Cultural Learning, Development and Cognition:

• What are the psychological processes that allow children and adults to acquire culture (ideas, beliefs, values, ways of thinking, and habits of mind)?
• Who do people pay attention to for social learning, and how do they integrate information across different people?
• What kinds of inferential assumptions are brought into the cultural learning processes

Coevolutionary Origins of Human Cultural Learning Capacities, Cognition, and Sociality

• How can the logic of natural selection and data from ancient environments be combined to predict the kinds of learning mechanisms make up our cultural learning abilities?
• How can we explain the tremendous success of the human species and the unique nature of our cognitive abilities?
• What are the evolutionary origins of prestige and prestige-biased transmission
• The evolution of cooperation, institutions, societal complexity: How and why did some human groups develop large-scale cooperation, complexity and specific social forms?
• Common pool resource and public goods problems: How do societies solve, or fail to solve, these social dilemmas?
• Evolution of social stratification: why do some societies have classes and why do they often persist for long periods?
• Culture and cumulative adaptation: How, and when does cultural transmission lead to cumulative adaptation?

How can we build a theory of economic decision-making that takes culture and evolved psychology seriously?

• Given what is known about cultural learning and human decision-making, how can we construct of psychologically-based theory that can account for pattern of economic behavior and change.
• What are the origins of people's preferences and beliefs?
• What is the origin of risk aversion in people's decision-making about money? Why are people from some populations not risk averse?
• What causes novel economic practices and technologies to diffuse through populations?
• Are social norms internalized and how does this influence decision-making?

The Evolution of Religious Beliefs, Rituals, and Institutions

• How have religious beliefs, rituals and institutions coevolved over human history?
• How do reliably developing aspects of human cognition influence the content of religions?
• How do religious beliefs, and ritual participation, influence sociality, altrusim, prosociality and decision-making?
• What is the impact of competition among religious institutions on the nature of beliefs and rituals?

Methodological Interests

• Intregating experimental techniques from cognitive and development psychology and experimental economics with in-depth, long-term field ethnography
• Measuring social norms and emotions
• Cultural Consensus Modeling--measuring culture and cultural varation, both within and between social groups.
• Social Network and Cultural Information Networks
• Ethological observation and video techniques
• Evolutionary game theory and simulation

Field and Regional Interests

• Amazonia (Peruvian Amazon and the Machiguenga)
• Oceania (Fiji, in the Yasawa Islands)
• Chile (Among the Mapuche around Chol-Chol)