Cedric Perret

cedric.perret.research[at]gmail.com

My research aims to understand the causes behind the rise or decline of political and economic inequality in human societies, using a combination of mathematical and computational models. This topic involves questions such as what conditions are necessary versus sufficient for the emergence, mitigation, or persistence of inequality? Under what circumstances does leadership and centralized governance enhance social welfare, and when does it lead to corruption and inequality? Why did shifts in sociopolitical organisation occur at different rates (or not at all) in different parts of the world?

To investigate these questions, I adopt an evolutionary framework that offers a distinctive perspective by considering that the social organization of a society is the product of genes and culture adapting to their environment. More specifically, my unique method is to integrate models of social and economic processes — how individuals make decisions, coordinate, and exchange — into models of long-term behavioral change, such as evolutionary models.

During my Ph.D., I explored under which conditions beneficial leadership can naturally emerge and how it can lead to inequality. Later on, I focused on exploring in which environments subordinates can counteract despotic leaders, for instance, by overthrowing them or by migrating away. I also collaborated to test different theories on the evolution of inequality on a unique dataset on the Kofun period in Japan (coming up soon!).

I am working on two projects in my current postdoc. One, I am investigating how the emergence of exchange and trade has modified individual strategies and social interactions in human societies. Two, I am exploring how the political structure of a society affects the cultural evolution of institutional rules.

On a broader spectrum, I am interested in a range of topics including the evolution of cooperation, cultural evolution, the evolution of moral rules, and social interactions between humans and machines. I am also very eager to connect theoretical work with real-world data, so feel free to contact me!

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Selected publications

2023

Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality

Cedric Perret, and Thomas E. Currie

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Jun 2023

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Circumscription theory proposes that complex hierarchical societies emerged in areas surrounded by barriers to dispersal, e.g. mountains or seas. This theory has been widely influential but the lack of formal modelling has resulted in theoretical and empirical challenges. This theory shares parallels with reproductive skew models from evolutionary ecology where inequality depends on the capacity of subordinates to escape from despotic leaders. Building on these similarities, we extend reproductive skew models to simulate the concurrent evolution of inequality in many connected groups. Our results show that cost of migration does not directly limit inequality in the long term, but it does control the rate of increase in inequality. Second, we show that levels of inequality can be reduced if there are random errors made by dominants, as these lead to variations that propagate between polities. Third, our model clarifies the concept of circumscription by relating it to geographical features: the size of a region and the connectivity between polities. Overall, our model helps clarify some issues about how migration may affect inequality. We discuss our results in the light of anthropological and archaeological evidence and present the future extensions required to build towards a complete model of circumscription theory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.