Projects

I study how societies’ environment shapes the way they are organised and how that organisation shapes their long-term biological and cultural evolution.

To investigate these questions, my unique method is to integrate models of social and economic processes — how individuals make decisions, coordinate, and exchange — into models of long-term behavioural change, such as biological and cultural evolutionary models. My work clusters into three main themes.

Origin and evolution of social inequality

During my PhD, I explored the conditions under which beneficial leadership can emerge on its own (2020, 2023) when leaders reduce the cost of collective decision-making (2022), and how hierarchy can tip into inequality (2018). I later looked more broadly at ways the environment can drive inequality: I identified geographical settings in which subordinates can or cannot migrate away from despotic leaders (2023), and how growing group size erodes their capacity to collectively overthrow despotic leaders (under revision).

Most recently, I have been developing a model that places several competing theories of inequality on common ground, so that explanations usually stated in incompatible terms can be compared directly. Beyond clarifying the theory, it is meant to give archaeologists a tool for interpreting the material record, and we aim to test it against data from the Kofun period in Japan.

Origin and consequences of economic specialisation

Another line of work concerns the division of labour and economic specialisation: why it arises in some societies and not others, and what follows once it does. Its origins remain debated in archaeology, while standard economic models tend to take as fixed the very things that change over the long run — a population’s genetic make-up, or its knowledge and culture. By combining economic and evolutionary models, I have shown how the emergence of exchange and trade can favour genetic diversity, and how that diversity and economic specialisation can promote one another (2025). I am now examining more closely what conditions lead to specialisation once the knowledge behind it accumulates across generations through cultural evolution, rather than being acquired within a single lifetime (writing up).

Cultural evolution of institutions

A key question is whether institutions and rules can evolve the way technologies do, becoming better over time even when no one understands why they work. I generalise existing models in which preferences for a rule spread by being copied from successful individuals, as in cultural evolution, and asked when this improves a group’s rule. I show that it can, but not always: whether it does depends on how the group makes its decisions, and even on its size (under review). For instance, contrary to the familiar result that larger populations adapt better, I find that larger groups can settle on worse rules, or lose good ones. This opens a wider programme I now want to pursue: mapping which features of social organisation help institutions improve and which hold them back, beginning with the role of different political systems.

Other and earlier work

Earlier in my career, I worked on how moral rules evolve when individuals disagree about what is right, and which of them sustain cooperation (2021); and on modelling trust as a heuristic that spares individuals the cost of monitoring their partners (2026). I have also contributed to a range of collaborative projects and shorter opinion pieces.