Category Archives: Collaborations

Life History and Learning Workshop at UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

I spent the weekend at a workshop on Life History and Learning at UC Berkeley, organized by Alison Gopnik. I presented the “Cultural Brain Hypothesis and Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis”, which was recently published in PLOS Computational Biology (see here for discussion).

It was a small workshop, which made for some wonderful discussions with:
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (UC Davis)
Willem Frankenhuis (Radboud University)
Michael Gurven (UC Santa Barbara)
Kristen Hawkes (University of Utah)
Celeste Kidd (UC Berkeley)
Julie Morand-Ferron (University of Ottawa)
Thomas Morgan (Arizona State University)
Susan Perry (UCLA)
Pete Richerson (UC Davis)
Mike Tomasello (Duke)
Natalie Uomini (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

 

 

Overconfidence at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

I spent the last week at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. I was invited to present my paper on how “Sociality Influences Cultural Complexity“. I also helped set up an experiment that Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and I are running in collaboration with Tatsuya Kameda and Wataru Toyokawa. We previously collected data in Hong Kong in collaboration with Takeshi Hamamura.

Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan 

Muthukrishna, M., Shulman, B. W., Vasilescu, V., & Henrich, J. (2013). Sociality influences cultural complexity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1774).

Sante Fe Institute Workshop on Network Structure, Political Hierarchy and Economic Inequality

I was invited to a workshop on Network Structure, Political Hierarchy and Economic Inequality at the Sante Fe Institute. The workshop, organized by Sam Bowles and Paul Hooper, brought together leading contributors to the theoretical literature on social networks, anthropologists and other field researchers using network techniques to study the social structure of small-scale societies. I had the opportunity to discuss social network analysis and its application to the study of social structures and culture with several lead social network researchers, including Matt Jackson and Rajiv Sethi.

The project is part of the Santa Fe Institute’s Dynamics of Wealth Inequality Project.

Liu Scholar

I was recently made a Liu Scholar by the Liu Institute for Global Issues. The Liu Scholar Program brings together doctoral students from various disciplines whose research intersects with global issues. As a Liu Scholar, I hope to collaborate with researchers and other stakeholders to explore how the science of culture and cultural evolution can be applied to issues, such as sustainability, security, and social justice.