The Society, Evolution, and Culture Lab team, with director Pierre Lienard, focuses on three major areas of investigation in a cognitive and evolutionary framework:
- How social agents reduce risk in an uncertain world
- How they coordinate into coalitions
- How informal institutions facilitate cooperation in complex social worlds
The investigation of those research questions has required a particular framework involving ethnographic comparison between developing and developed worlds, oscillation between ethnography and experimental method, and consilience of disciplines (anthropology, evolutionary, and cognitive psychologies; behavioral ecology; and institutional studies).
Get more information on the SEC lab's research and a sample of selected and most recent publications.
Topics of Inquiry and Areas of Interest
- Social anthropology, anthropology of politics, and evolutionary psychology
- Cultures and cognition, cultural evolution
- Political institutions, comparative politics, and political psychology
- Social complexity and institutional designs of weakly centralized sociopolitical systems
- Coalitional coordination and collective action
- Signaling and uses of strategic information in specific social ecologies
- Cooperation in threatening ecology
- Trust allocation and precaution psychology in an uncertain world
- Psychology of ritualized behavior