Michael Muthukrishna
Appointment
CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars 2021-2023
Boundaries Membership & Belonging
Connect
About
Michael Muthukrishna’s research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and cultural change. This includes the psychology of social learning and group membership and how this psychology plays out at a population-level. His research identifies psychological and social levers of innovation and cultural transmission. To answer these questions, Muthukrishna uses a two-pronged approach combining mathematical and computational modeling, and experimental and data science methods, drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. He uses the “Theory of Human Behavior” that emerges from this approach to tackle a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, and the navigation of cross-cultural differences.
Awards
- SAGE Emerging Scholar Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), 2022
- APS Rising Star, Association of Psychological Science (APS), 2021
- CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences, Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), 2016
- PhD Dissertation Excellence Award, Canadian Psychological Association, 2016
- Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Government of Canada, 2013
Relevant Publications
Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). The origins and psychology of human cooperation. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 207-240.
Muthukrishna, M., Bell, A. V., Henrich, J., Curtin, C. M., Gedranovich, A., McInerney, J., & Thue, B. (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.
Schaller, M., & Muthukrishna, M. (2020). Modeling cultural change: computational models of interpersonal influence dynamics can yield new insights about how cultures change, which cultures change more rapidly than others, and why. American Psychologist.