I’m Professor of Economic Psychology at New York University (NYU) and the London School of Economics (LSE). My other affiliations include:
– Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD
– Affiliate of the Data Science Institute
– Director of the PhD Programme in Psychological and Behavioural Science
– Scientific Advisor at Electric Twin – AI startup
– Fellow at the Charter Cities Institute
– Research Lead in Cities, Culture, & Technology at Africa Urban Lab (AUL), African School of Economics (ASE), Zanzibar
– Technical Director of The Database of Religious History
– Board member of the One Pencil Project
– Founder of LSE Culturalytik – a new approach to culture and diversity
– Co-Founder of London School of Artificial Intelligence (LSAI)

I study how culture turns individual minds into collective intelligence and how we can turn that intelligence into human progress using mathematical, computational, experimental, and data science methods from psychological and behavioral science, economics, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence. More specifically, my research focuses on:
(1) Explaining how humans became the most dominant species on the planet
(2) Why, despite this, we often fail to solve problems we already know how to solve
(3) How to apply this knowledge tackle a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, navigation of cross-cultural differences, governance policy innovation, and how humans can best work with artificial intelligence.

I have won several significant awards for my research, most recently:

• 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology, Leverhulme Trust
• 2023 HBES Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES)
• 2023 HBES Rising Star Award, Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES)
• 2022 SAGE Emerging Scholar Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)
• 2021 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
• 2021 APS Rising Star, Association of Psychological Science (APS)

A quick summary: Humans are not especially fast, strong, or even individually brilliant. Instead our advantage is cultural evolution: we learn from one another, accumulate new cultural and cognitive software across generations, and store solutions as norms and institutions. This process has allowed millions of strangers to cooperate and innovate new solutions as a “collective brain”. This distributed computation within our collective brains filters solutions and is the engine behind science, markets, cities, demography, technology, growth, and progress.

Human progress isn’t inevitable. Institutions can be mismatched to cultural norms or stuck in ways of working that no longer solve problems in a modern context; cooperation of many can be corrupted by cooperation of a few; cultural distance and mistrust can be a friction to communication and cooperation; new technologies can disrupt old systems, cultures, and ways of governing ourselves.

I’m still an engineer at heart and enjoy building things to solve these problems in domains from AI and education to cities, governance, development, and progress studies. Some of my activities include:

Founder

Scientific Advisor

Fellow or Advisory Board Member

Teaching

Substack Newsletter

My CV is available here.

I am the author of A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, which is available here: https://atheoryofeveryone.com. The book summarizes this body of research for a general audience and shows how this new understanding can help us tackle the practical and existential challenges humans now face.