Post-Doc, Anthropology
Thesis Title: The evolution of large-scale cooperation in human populations
About
I am broadly interested in the evolution of sociality and culture. In particular, I am interested in understanding the mechanisms and processes that lead to the evolution of cooperation and altruism. My research combines methods from behavioural ecology, evolutionary economics and cultural evolution.
A key focus of my research is the evolution of large-scale cooperation in human populations. Large-scale cooperation between unrelated individuals is an evolutionary puzzle. While major theoretical advances have been made in recent years, there is a need for empirical work evaluating whether existing theory explains real-world patterns of cooperation. My work contributes to an empirical research programme testing gene-culture co-evolution models of cooperation in real-world populations. The main objective is to test whether variation in cooperation across populations is driven by differences in demography and ecology or culture. My study populations are multiple villages of a small-scale forager-horticultural society called the Pahari Korwa living in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. My methods combine behavioural data collected via experimental economic games as well as more naturalistic measures of behaviour with demographic, ecological and social data on individuals and populations.
Contact Information
| Homepage: | http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/research_ |
