Studying human behavior and culture requires a diverse toolkit. You’ll acquire some of these tools during graduate school, but a multidisciplinary background is highly valued. Quantitative skills such as mathematics, physics, statistics, economics, engineering, or computer science, are particularly useful.

GRE scores are not required for UK applications, but including your GRE scores will increase the competitiveness of your application.

PhD programs in the UK are 3-4 years and generally require a Masters degree. If you’re an undergraduate, I encourage you to apply for a 1 year LSE MSc program. The MSc includes coursework and research and is similar to the first year of a US or Canadian PhD.

There are no coursework requirements in the PhD program. All requisite coursework will be completed during the MSc program. The expectation in the UK is that you will already have the skills necessary to complete your PhD before you begin the program (hence the importance of undergraduate background and completion of a Masters degree).

Details on how to apply can be found on the LSE Graduate Admissions page. Applications open around October and decisions start being made at the beginning of November. I encourage you to apply early. To quote the LSE website:

There is intense competition for admission; early applications have a greater chance of being successful and of meeting financial support/scholarship and visa deadlines.

Only a few programmes have deadlines by which you should apply – decisions are mostly considered on a rolling basis and programmes close once all places are filled. Many scholarships, however, especially for research programmes, have early deadlines. See individual programme entries and the financial support section for details of particular deadlines.

Both MSc and PhD programs generally begin the following September.

More details on deadlines on the LSE website.

There are several sources of funding for both MSc and PhDs. As a guideline, the LSE PhD Studentship is £18,000 / year and this can be topped up through teaching fellowships and research assistantships. You should apply for funding beforehand. Get in touch with me well before the deadline to discuss your plans. In addition to university funding, external funding opportunities can be found through the two major research councils:

• Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
• Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

as well as the following scholarships for MSc:

• Commonwealth Master’s Scholarship (for residents of a selected list of Commonwealth countries)
• GREAT scholarship (for residents of a selected list of 18 countries)
• Chevening scholarship

More can be found via these search engines:

• Postgraduate studentships.
• Scholarship search.

For more information, see:

• 2013 Guardian article on “How to find postgraduate funding”.
• Prospects on “Funding postgraduate study”.
• British Psychological Society list of fellowships targeting non-UK applicants.

You can read more about my research interests and approaches on my Research page.

For an introduction to cultural evolution, I recommend this chapter from the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.

For an extended review of current research, I recommend Joseph Henrich‘s excellent book on “The Secret of our Success“.

For hypotheses about how Dual Inheritance Theory explains institutions, innovation, and intelligence, among other things, see “Innovation in the Collective Brain“.