Research
My research examines how cooperation, competition, and culture shape human societies across scales. I use evolutionary game theory, cultural evolution and computational social science to study how social systems emerge, stabilize and sometimes collapse.
Across my work, I am interested in understanding how humans sustain cooperation in increasingly large and complex societies, how institutions shape social behaviour and how cultural practices adapt to social and ecological conditions. My research combines formal mathematical modelling with empirical and computational approaches. Broadly, my work focuses on three interconnected themes: large-scale cooperation, social norms and institutions and cultural transmission through networks and emerging technologies.
Scaling Cooperation
For 95% of human existence cooperation occured only in small groups of kin and close relations, but in the last 12 000 years the scale of human cooperation has exploded to groups consisting of millions or even billions of individuals working together. My work studies the mechanisms that allow cooperation to emerge, persist, and expand across social scales, with a particular focus on cooperation in large and complex societies.
Using evolutionary game theory and dynamical systems modelling, I develop formal models exploring how cooperative systems transition between different equilibria. In this research, cooperation often depends on threshold dynamics: societies may remain trapped in low-cooperation states until critical social or institutional thresholds are crossed, enabling access to larger scales of coordination and productivity.
I am particularly interested in how population dynamics, institutional incentives, and social structure shape these transitions. This work connects questions in cultural evolution and complexity science with broader problems concerning collective action, institutional development, and the evolution of large-scale societies.
Another strand of this research examines how cooperation across different social scales can come into tension with itself. In work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I show how reputation, often believed to be sufficient for maintaining large-scale cooperation, can actually undermine large-scale cooperation by overemphasising local interactions. Rather than treating corruption or nepotism simply as failures of cooperation, this framework suggests that such behaviours may emerge from conflicts between local and large-scale cooperation.
Together, this research seeks to explain how societies sustain cooperation despite the competing pressures created by scale, coordination, and institutional complexity.
Social Norms and Institutions
Social norms and institutions shape our everyday interactions, however these don't emerge from thin air. Instead they shape, and are shaped, by culture.
In ongoing work, I develop formal models exploring how social competition and property rights shape patterns of conspicuous consumption, wealth concealment, and destructive competition. This research argues that behaviours such as conspicuous consumption, egalitarian norms, and evil eye beliefs are not isolated cultural phenomena, but interconnected cultural adaptations to different institutional and competitive environments.
Using game-theoretic and cultural evolutionary approaches, I study how societies differ in the extent to which competition becomes productive or destructive. In particular, I examine how weak institutional protections and intense social competition can create incentives for wealth concealment and status suppression, while stronger institutions encourage more open forms of status competition and conspicuous display.
More broadly, this research explores how institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs co-evolve with economic behaviour and social inequality. I am especially interested in how cultural practices that may appear irrational or maladaptive from one social perspective can instead represent adaptive responses to local competitive and institutional conditions.
Networks and Cultural Transmission
The distribution of knowledge within a society shapes its spread and evolution. Understanding how societies are socially structured and how information passes through these structures is key to understanding cultural evolution.
This work explores how network structures affect cultural transmission, coordination and social learning. I am particularly interested in understanding how social structures themselves may emerge as adaptive responses to the demands of cooperation and information exchange.
In related projects, I study how artificial intelligence systems and large language models reproduce culturally specific behaviours and social norms. By prompting AI agents across different cultural and linguistic contexts, this research investigates how cultural variation shapes communication, cooperation, and social interaction within artificial systems.
These projects connect cultural evolution with computational social science and emerging work on AI and society. More broadly, they examine how technologies, institutions, and networks reshape the dynamics of cultural evolution and collective behaviour.