#174 Michael Muthukrishna: Human Culture, The Cultural Brain, And Political Corruption

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Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Research Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He’s interested in better understanding the dynamic relationship between “cultures” and individuals, where cultures emerge from the interactions of individuals over time, who are in turn shaped by the emergent cultures they constitute. He’s particularly interested in the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy.

In this episode, we first talk about the interplay between biology and culture in explaining large-scale human cooperation, and the biological bases of human culture. We then refer to the Cultural Brain Hypothesis, the relationship between individual-level psychology and group-level traits, genetic and cultural evolution, and contentious topic of group selection. Finally, we talk about prosocial institutions, and political corruption and how societies might promote it and also common strategies to fight it that might backfire.

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Follow Dr. Muthukrishna’s work:

Faculty page: https://bit.ly/2JrvYoU

Articles of Researchgate: https://bit.ly/2XvyygB

Twitter handle: @mmuthukrishna

Referenced papers/concepts/books:

The Baldwin Effect: https://bit.ly/2Hy1krY

Cultural Evolution: https://bit.ly/2FkrdIh

The Secret of Our Success (Joe Henrich): https://amzn.to/2OiZWtP

A Different Kind of Animal (Rob Boyd): https://amzn.to/2FpsdMy

Darwin's Unfinished Symphony (Kevin Laland): https://amzn.to/2Frhm50

This View of Life (David S. Wilson): https://amzn.to/2HHVjs9

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