I taught a Guardian Masterclass on “How cultural and genetic evolution shape our behaviour” at The Guardian’s Weekend Psychology MA. Much of what I presented is discussed in this paper on “The Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability“.
Many thanks to host Claudia Hammond and The Guardian.
I was a keynote speaker at the Cooperative AI workshop at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). I spoke about “Cultural Evolution and Human Cooperation” and its relevance for understanding problems in cooperative AI. Some of the topics covered included, an introduction to dual inheritance theory and cultural evolution, how and why humans cooperate, and why human cooperation varies in scale, intensity, and domain across societies.
My speech and slides are available here.
I gave a plenary talk at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) Conference on “cultural evolutionary psychology”. My talk discussed how the Cultural Brain and the Collective Brain, can unify the work done in the last decade in evolutionary psychology under a common framework.
I explained how these hypotheses shed light on our understanding of intelligence, innovation, cooperation and the “paradox of diversity”.
Considering the limitations of psychology today, I discussed ways in which we can move beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) psychology in a global collaborative manner and strengthen the links between basic and applied policy research. I also discussed the importance of historical psychology.
Many thanks to Joseph Henrich for the enthusiastic introduction.
I gave a talk on “The ties that bind us” at the Beveridge 2.0. Symposium: Reciprocity across the life-cycle hosted by STICERD and the LSE School of Public Policy The talk applied the science of cooperation to the problem of the future welfare state, particularly around pensions and retirement. A corresponding paper is under review at LSE Public Policy Review.
I gave a talk on “Cooperation and the moral circle: When cooperation harms the collective good” as part of the SPSP 2021 Justice and Morality Pre-Conference. It’s part of some new work on the problem of the expanding moral circle as it links to cooperation, corruption, prosocial, and antisocial behavior. A related working paper is available here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.19.432029v2
Summary from Twitter thread:
New paper on “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation” in Annual Review of Psychology. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain human cooperation. How well do they explain the breadth, intensity, & variation across societies, history, & domain?
We review interdisciplinary evolutionary psychology that takes seriously both our primate heritage and our uniquely cultural nature – a “cultural evolutionary psychology”. Why, how, when, and on which things do different humans work together?
Humans in all societies cooperate far more than other mammals. We’re more prosocial than nonhuman primates who often look like rational choice models (these models are like Hardy-Weinberg models – null models without the effect of evolving norms & other culture).
A more complete explanation needs to explain scale, intensity, and domain differences between societies-people cooperate on different things to different degrees. Need to explain the scaling up in the last 12k years. And that many mechanisms can support maladaptive behav.
Explanations like language, intelligence, & institutions are insufficient. We can use language to lie, our cognitive abilities to cheat, & institutions can be undermined by lower scales of cooperation. Where did these come from anyway? See the cultural brain hypothesis & the collective brain. Also summarized in this lecture:
We use cultural evolution, dual inheritance theory, and the extended evolutionary synthesis as our theoretical framework & evaluate connected theories and evidence. For approach, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1 … (summarized).
Social norms and institutions – their origins and evolution is key to explaining the 4 features / puzzles of human cooperation mentioned before.
Some key concepts and behavioral experiments in cooperation.
Social norms shape cooperation, differ b/w societies, kids copy adults. Fairness is not the same everywhere – e.g. inequity aversion is not universally symmetric. We don’t like when things are unequal and we have less, but folks differ on unequal where they have more.
We review key mechanisms in broad strokes: kin-based, direct reciprocity, reputation, punishment, signaling. Origins of institutions. WEIRD intuitions are not a good guide – take partner choice for example.
So you have societies with different norms & sustained by different mechanisms of cooperation. Which ones spread? Competiton w/ sufficient resources can favor higher scales, but lower scales can undermine higher scales – corruption or autocracy or insurrection etc. Need alignment between levels.
The mechanisms of cooperation discussed are not alternatives to this competition. They are solutions to the free-rider problem with limits on scale and that can undermine one another. You also need to solve the equilibrium selection problem.
Social norms can create selection pressure on genes, they can self-domesticate. Institutions as connected and sometimes formalized social norms can create interdependence and fusion. They can align interests.
We end by revisiting the opening challenges. Check out the paper here:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106
http://muth.io/cooperation-review21
Norms vary by geography and over time. Also check out the related historical psychology paper.
I ran a workshop on communication competition at the Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA), part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The LILA group include people from industry and the military. We discussed various aspects of the science of cooperation, including how and when it fails.I also introduced some new work on the paradox of diversity and on measuring cultural distance.
One of the participants, Sue Borchardt is now making an animated series based on the talk.
I discussed how culture evolves with Marc Warner and the team at Faculty.ai. Fun conversations and great questions.
I was invited to present my work on cultural evolution and how scales of cooperation compete at the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) conference at the University of Warwick, UK. You can read more about cultural evolution in this chapter , more about scales of cooperating competing in this Evonomics / Promarket piece and some experimental evidence in this Nature Human Behavior paper.
I presented some work on measuring cultural distance “Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance” (pre-print) and some in-progress follow ups using the technique at the University of Economics, Prague, Czechia.
I also presented some in progress theoretical and empirical work on “Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and the evolution of evil eye beliefs”. Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print).
I presented some work on measuring cultural distance “Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance” (pre-print) and some in-progress follow ups using the technique at City University in London, UK.
I also presented some in progress theoretical and empirical work on “Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and the evolution of evil eye beliefs”. Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print).
I presented some in progress theoretical and empirical work on “Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and the evolution of evil eye beliefs” at the Biological Anthropology seminar series at University College London (UCL) in London, UK.
Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print) as well as some work on measuring cultural distance (pre-print).
I joined a panel for a discussion on War hosted by The Forum for Philosophy in association with the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE and the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I was joined by:
Susanne Burri, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, LSE
Michael Robillard, Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Joseph Maiolo, Professor of International History, Department of War Studies, KCL
The event was chaired by Jonathan Birch, Fellow, Forum for Philosophy; Associate Professor of Philosophy, LSE.
I presented some in progress theoretical and empirical work on “The Evolution of Evil Eye Beliefs and Related Behaviors” at the 2nd Cultural Evolution Society (CES) conference.
Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print). But the main part was work in progress on understanding the evolution of evil eye beliefs and hunter-gatherer egalitarianism.
I presented work on “Corruption, Cooperation, & the Evolution of
Evil Eye” at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) annual conference.
Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print). The other part was work in progress on understanding the evolution of evil eye.
I presented work on “Corruption, Cooperation, & the Evolution of Prosocial Institutions”, including some new work on the evolution of evil eye belief and related behaviors at the CIFAR Institutions, Organizations, and Growth program’s annual meeting.
Part of this work was based on a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, with some context published in Evonomics and ProMarket (pre-print). The other part was work in progress on understanding the evolution of evil eye.
I was invited to present my work on Corruption, Cooperation, & the Evolution of Prosocial Institutions at the Cooperation for Exploitation workshop at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) in Vienna, Austria.
I was invited to present my work on Corruption, Cooperation, & the Evolution of Prosocial Institutions at LSE-Stanford Conference on Long-Run Development in Latin America. This year’s conference was hosted at the London School of Economics.
I chaired a themed session on “Cultural Evolution and Economics” at the Inaugural Cultural Evolution Society Conference. Speakers including myself, my student collaborator Xueheng Li, and Heidi Colleran. My PhD student, Ryutaro Uchiyama presented some new analyses on the Cultural Brain Hypothesis in a parallel session.
I presented a the “Cultural Evolution of Economics” with some illustrations on how cultural evolution can help economists and how economists can help those interested in cultural evolution. To illustrate this, I presented some recent and upcoming work on cooperation, corruption, democracy and economic growth. Abstract below:
Homo Economicus are extinct or on the verge of extinction, or so it would appear from outside economics. But within economics, reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Economicus’ persist, in part because alternative theories of human behavior are not readily integrated into existing economic approaches. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, criticism is not sufficient—you need to build a better model. I’ll discuss collaborations at the London School of Economics that are attempting to build that better model by integrating cultural evolutionary theory into economics. A cultural evolutionary approach seats corruption as a special case of cooperation, offering new means to understand and combat it (Muthukrishna, et al., 2017, “Corrupting Cooperation and How Anti-Corruption Strategies May Backfire”, Nature Human Behavior). A cultural evolutionary approach helps identify the invisible cultural pillars that support successful economic and democratic institutions (Stimmler & Muthukrishna, 2017, “When Cooperation Promotes Corruption and Undermines Democracy”, Working Paper; Muthukrishna, et al., in prep, “A WEIRD scale of cultural distance”). A cultural evolutionary approach reveals the relationship between economic growth, inequality, tolerance for inequality, and widespread beliefs—like “evil eye” and witchcraft—that have economic implications (Li & Muthukrishna, 2017, “The coevolution of Economic Growth, Inequality, Tolerance for Inequality, and Belief in Evil Eye”, Working Paper). These related studies reveal how cultural evolution may offer new approaches to age old problems, but also how the economic toolkit may be deployed to understand culturally evolved beliefs and behaviors.
Li presented an economic model and corresponding experimental test on the co-evolution of economic growth, inequality, tolerance for inequality and the widespread belief in “evil eye“.
All together a lot of fun and excellent talks by lots of familiar names and even more familiar faces. Many thanks to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Russell Gray and the rest of the organizing committee: Andy Whiten, Fiona Jordan , Joe Brewer, Michele Gelfand, Michelle Kline, and Olivier Morin.
