Michael Muthukrishna

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Michael Muthukrishna is an associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), in England. [1] He is an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at the LSE's STICERD, technical director of UBC's Database of Religious History, [2] and CIFAR's Azrieli Global Scholar in the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging programme. [1] His main area of interest is the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy. [3]

Contents

Research

Muthukrishna's research addresses three main areas: [3]

  1. Exploring the unique aspects that distinguish humans from other animals
  2. Investigating the underlying psychological and evolutionary mechanisms driving cultural and social change
  3. Applying insights gained from these questions to address global challenges

His research employs a dual methodology involving mathematical and computational modeling as well as experimental and data science techniques from psychology and economics. [4] The resulting "Theory of Human Behavior" informs various areas, including innovation, corruption, the emergence of large-scale cooperation, and cross-cultural navigation. [5]

Key contributions

Cultural brain hypothesis

Muthukrishna has played a pivotal role in the development and advancement of the cultural brain hypothesis. [6] His research in 2018 involved the construction of a model that was firmly rooted in this hypothesis, shedding light on critical relationships among brain size, group size, social learning, and mating structures. [6] [7]

Muthukrishna's work was instrumental in formulating this model, which operated based on three fundamental assumptions: [8]

  1. Combining brain size, complexity, and organization into a single variable
  2. Establishing that a larger brain equates to a greater capacity for acquiring adaptive knowledge
  3. Demonstrating that an increase in adaptive knowledge enhances the fitness of organisms

Through evolutionary simulations, Muthukrishna and his colleagues were able to validate the existence of the hypothesized relationships. [8] Their findings with regard to the cultural brain hypothesis model showed that larger brains have the ability to store more information and adaptive knowledge, thereby supporting the existence of larger social groups. [8]

Collective brain

In 2016, Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich explored the concept that cultural evolution and progress are not solely dependent on individual intelligence but also heavily reliant on collective intelligence and transmissions. [9] They argued that while individual intelligence is important, it is the rapid advancement of human culture, technology, and knowledge driven by culmulative efforts and knowledge. [9] They proposed that as information and innovations accumulate, subsequent generations build upon this knowledge base, leading to exponential growth in understanding and problem-solving abilities. [7]

Their research emphasises that human intelligence is not limited to individual cognitive abilities but is deeply rooted in the collective intelligence of societies. [9] The ability to preserve and build upon the knowledge of previous generations plays a vital role in driving human progress, particularly in areas such as technology, science, and social organization.

Cultural distances and "WEIRD" populations

Muthukrishna is a critic of the methodology within psychological research related to issues with bias and poor sampling for research populations. He emphasises the need to expand the scope of research to include more diverse populations from different cultures and backgrounds to reduce bias and subjectivity of results when only considering samples that are WEIRD (Western-Educated-Industrialised-Rich-Democratic). [10]

Muthukrisna provides context and a solution for this issue in a 2020 paper, where he introduces the concept of "cultural distance" and "psychological distance" as measures to quantify the differences between populations. [10] Cultural distance refers to the dissimilarity in cultural norms, values, and practices between groups, while psychological distance assesses the variations in cognitive processes, emotions, and behavior.

He and his colleagues have argued that a generalised theory of human behavior requires theoretical and empirical understanding of humans across the globe and across the life span, which can be achieved through the use of cultural distance metrics. [10] The results of his research suggest humans have more similarities in culture than differences, and he provides a tool to measure the cultural distances between different countries. His aim through doing so is to guide researchers in selecting sites and samples that are sufficiently culturally different to test the generalizability of their hypotheses. [10]

Culturalytik – measuring and analysing cultural diversity

Muthukrishna has made substantial contributions to the field of cultural evolution, particularly in its application to public policy and real-world problem-solving . His work has led to the development of Culturalytik, a platform designed for cultural measurement, analysis, and the creation of behavioral interventions. [11]

Culturalytik's distinctive feature lies in its utilization of advanced methodologies to accurately identify and analyse culturally significant aspects. [11] Muthukrishna and his team’s primary objective was to recognize and safeguard vital elements of culture, aiming to optimize knowledge retention, stimulate innovation, enhance customer satisfaction, improve key performance indicators, and facilitate global expansion initiatives. [11]

Awards

Muthukrishna has received a number of awards for his contribution to the field of behavioural science and cultural evolution:

Publications

Books

A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going (ISBN 9781399810630) (2023) [13] [14]

The book offers a multidisciplinary framework that delves into human behavior, culture, and society. [14] Muthukrishna suggests that our unique cultural capacity differentiates us from other life forms. He advocates applying life principles like energy dynamics, innovation, cooperation, and evolution to overcome 21st-century challenges, including polarization, inequality, productivity stagnation, and energy crises. [14]

Journal articles

Related Research Articles

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.

Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

Sex differences in psychology are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, sexuality, friendship, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be innate, learned, or both. Modern research attempts to distinguish between these causes and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture, researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences, although this is often not possible.

The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language. The timeline of human evolution spans approximately seven million years, from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. The first three million years of this timeline concern Sahelanthropus, the following two million concern Australopithecus and the final two million span the history of the genus Homo in the Paleolithic era.

Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.

This article is a general timeline of psychology.

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.

Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.

Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark van Vugt</span> Dutch evolutionary psychologist (born 1967)

Mark van Vugt is a Dutch evolutionary psychologist who holds a professorship in evolutionary psychology and work and organizational psychology at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Van Vugt has affiliate positions at the University of Oxford, Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Henrich</span> American evolutionary biologist (born 1968)

Joseph Henrich is an American professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.

Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psychology.

Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.

Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.

Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a national longitudinal study started in 2009 that has repeatedly sampled over 45,000 New Zealanders. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Dr Michael Muthukrishna". London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
  2. ↑ "People". religiondatabase.org. Retrieved November 1, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Michael Muthukrishna" . Retrieved August 22, 2023.[ dead link ]
  4. 1 2 3 "Dr. Michael Muthukrishna". coevolution.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
  5. ↑ "Michael Muthukrishna". scholar.google.com. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
  6. 1 2 Muthukrishna, Michael; Doebeli, Michael; Chudek, Maciej; Henrich, Joseph (October 25, 2017). "The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, underlies sociality, and alters life history" (PDF). doi:10.1101/209007. S2CID   89877741 . Retrieved September 5, 2023.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. 1 2 Henrich, Joseph Patrick (2016). The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton university press. ISBN   978-0-691-16685-8.
  8. 1 2 3 Muthukrishna, Michael; Doebeli, Michael; Chudek, Maciej; Henrich, Joseph (November 8, 2018). Tarnita, Corina E (ed.). "The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history". PLOS Computational Biology. 14 (11): e1006504. Bibcode:2018PLSCB..14E6504M. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006504 . ISSN   1553-7358. PMC   6224031 . PMID   30408028.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Muthukrishna, Michael; Henrich, Joseph (March 19, 2016). "Innovation in the collective brain". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 371 (1690): 20150192. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0192. ISSN   0962-8436. PMC   4780534 . PMID   26926282.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Muthukrishna, Michael; Bell, Adrian V.; Henrich, Joseph; Curtin, Cameron M.; Gedranovich, Alexander; McInerney, Jason; Thue, Braden (June 2020). "Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance". Psychological Science. 31 (6): 678–701. doi:10.1177/0956797620916782. ISSN   0956-7976. PMC   7357184 . PMID   32437234.
  11. 1 2 3 "Culturalytik: A Full-Service Cultural Diversity Measurement, Analysis, and Behavioural Science Intervention". info.lse.ac.uk. Retrieved September 5, 2023.
  12. ↑ Kahn, T.; Bosch, J.; Levitt, M. F.; Goldstein, M. H. (2016). "Effect of sodium nitrate loading on electrolyte transport by the renal tubule". The American Journal of Physiology. 229 (3): 746–753. doi:10.1152/ajplegacy.1975.229.3.746. ISSN   0002-9513. PMID   2016 – via NIH.
  13. ↑ "A theory of everyone: who we are, how we got here, and where we're going". London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
  14. 1 2 3 "A Theory of Everyone". MIT Press. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
  15. ↑ Muthukrishna, Michael; Henrich, Joseph (March 2019). "A problem in theory". Nature Human Behaviour. 3 (3): 221–229. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1. ISSN   2397-3374. PMID   30953018. S2CID   59945071.
  16. ↑ Muthukrishna, Michael; Henrich, Joseph (March 19, 2016). "Innovation in the collective brain". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 371 (1690): 20150192. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0192. ISSN   0962-8436. PMC   4780534 . PMID   26926282.
  17. ↑ Muthukrishna, Michael; Shulman, Ben W.; Vasilescu, Vlad; Henrich, Joseph (January 7, 2014). "Sociality influences cultural complexity". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 281 (1774): 20132511. doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.2511. ISSN   0962-8452. PMC   3843838 . PMID   24225461.
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