Human cultural transmission
IHO research scientist Thomas Morgan leads a team of scientists investigating how, when and why humans learn from each other and how these decisions shape the large-scale cultural changes that shape societies and allow us to flourish in a complex and changing environment. To answer these questions Morgan combines formal evolutionary models with laboratory studies of human behavior.
Team
Notable Publications
- Morgan T.J.H.*, Watson R.*, Lenfesty H.L., Brand C.O. Human prestige psychology can promote adaptive inequality in social influence. Nature Communications, 17, 947.
- Morgan T.J.H. & Feldman M.W. Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 28-42.
- Morgan, T.J.H.*, Suchow, J.W.* & Griffiths, T.L. The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 289, 20221614.
Major Funding
$4,786,471 grant FP00007906 from DARPA through NGS2. Project entitled “Culture-On-A-Chip Computing: Crowdsourced Simulations of Culture, Group Formation, And Collective Identity”, in collaboration with UC Berkeley.