Michael Muthukrishna
Biographic Data
| ID | 910368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Muthukrishna |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Muthukrishna |
| SIGNATURE | MUTHUKRISHNA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7079-5166 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 69 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Inconvenience and generalization in building a better psychology: Commentary on Sherman (2025)
In this commentary, we supplement Sherman's (2025) defense of convenience sampling, reviewing the complementary role of broad generalization and diverse samples. Specifically, Sherman's commentary could be misinterpreted as downplaying or disavowing the importance of broad generalization, despite the latter being necessary if we are to capture more than a narrow sliver of human cognitive variation. Moreover, we argue that stating the generalizabi…
AI Can Revolutionise Education but Technology Is Not Enough: Human Development Meets Cultural Evolution
Artificial Intelligence could dramatically boost educational outcomes and close gaps – but only if policymakers take a human-centred, systems-level approach to AI integration. Cultural evolution, the science of how beliefs, values, norms, technologies and institutions evolve over time, offers a framework for understanding the promises and pitfalls of different approaches to AI in education policy. Using this perspective and drawing on comparative…
Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences
Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models
Culture fundamentally shapes people’s reasoning, behavior, and communication. As people increasingly use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite and automate personal and professional tasks, cultural values embedded in AI models may bias people’s authentic expression and contribute to the dominance of certain cultures. We conduct a disaggregated evaluation of cultural bias for five widely used large language models (OpenAI’s GPT-4o/4-…
Theory in leadership and management
The Database of Religious History (DRH): Ontology, coding strategies and the future of cultural evolutionary analyses
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing designers of large-scale, cross-cultural databases is that of ontology, both in terms of defining the unit of analysis and the construction of an appropriate back-end architecture. These decisions are also impacted by the coding strategies adopted, envisioned users, and funding limitations. This article explores how one particular database project, the Database of Religious History (DRH), has addressed these i…
Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy
Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution…
Harden, Kathryn Paige. 2021. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
Article Harden, Kathryn Paige. 2021. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality was published on April 1, 2022 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 6, issue 1)
Psychology as a Historical Science
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-temporal variation. The traces of past human cognition accessible through historical texts and artifac…
The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation
Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that con…
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
Cultural change can occur as an emergent consequence of social influence dynamics within cultural populations. These influence dynamics are complex, and formal modeling methods-such as agent-based models-are a useful means of predicting implications for cultural change. These models may be especially useful if they not only model the psychological outcomes of interpersonal influence, but also model social network structures within a culture. When…
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (Weird) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from …
Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. (2019), “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History”
As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantita…
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change
Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, an…
Cultural evolutionary public policy
A problem in theory
Dual Inheritance Theory
Dual Inheritance Theory
Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire
The when and who of social learning and conformist transmission
Theories of the deep: Combining salience and network analyses to produce mental model visualizations of a coastal British Columbia food web
Levine, J., M. Muthukrishna, K. M. A. Chan, and T. Satterfield. 2015. Theories of the deep: combining salience and network analyses to produce mental model visualizations of a coastal British Columbia food web. Ecology and Society 20(4):42.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08094-200442
A problem in theory
Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change
Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, an…
Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy
Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution…
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire
Cultural evolutionary public policy
Theories of the deep: Combining salience and network analyses to produce mental model visualizations of a coastal British Columbia food web
Levine, J., M. Muthukrishna, K. M. A. Chan, and T. Satterfield. 2015. Theories of the deep: combining salience and network analyses to produce mental model visualizations of a coastal British Columbia food web. Ecology and Society 20(4):42.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08094-200442
The when and who of social learning and conformist transmission
Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire
Dual Inheritance Theory
Dual Inheritance Theory
Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change
Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, an…
Cultural evolutionary public policy
A problem in theory
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (Weird) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from …
Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. (2019), “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History”
As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantita…
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
Psychology as a Historical Science
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-temporal variation. The traces of past human cognition accessible through historical texts and artifac…
The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation
Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that con…
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
Cultural change can occur as an emergent consequence of social influence dynamics within cultural populations. These influence dynamics are complex, and formal modeling methods-such as agent-based models-are a useful means of predicting implications for cultural change. These models may be especially useful if they not only model the psychological outcomes of interpersonal influence, but also model social network structures within a culture. When…
Harden, Kathryn Paige. 2021. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
Article Harden, Kathryn Paige. 2021. The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality was published on April 1, 2022 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 6, issue 1)
Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy
Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution…
Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models
Culture fundamentally shapes people’s reasoning, behavior, and communication. As people increasingly use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite and automate personal and professional tasks, cultural values embedded in AI models may bias people’s authentic expression and contribute to the dominance of certain cultures. We conduct a disaggregated evaluation of cultural bias for five widely used large language models (OpenAI’s GPT-4o/4-…
Theory in leadership and management
The Database of Religious History (DRH): Ontology, coding strategies and the future of cultural evolutionary analyses
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing designers of large-scale, cross-cultural databases is that of ontology, both in terms of defining the unit of analysis and the construction of an appropriate back-end architecture. These decisions are also impacted by the coding strategies adopted, envisioned users, and funding limitations. This article explores how one particular database project, the Database of Religious History (DRH), has addressed these i…
Inconvenience and generalization in building a better psychology: Commentary on Sherman (2025)
In this commentary, we supplement Sherman's (2025) defense of convenience sampling, reviewing the complementary role of broad generalization and diverse samples. Specifically, Sherman's commentary could be misinterpreted as downplaying or disavowing the importance of broad generalization, despite the latter being necessary if we are to capture more than a narrow sliver of human cognitive variation. Moreover, we argue that stating the generalizabi…
AI Can Revolutionise Education but Technology Is Not Enough: Human Development Meets Cultural Evolution
Artificial Intelligence could dramatically boost educational outcomes and close gaps – but only if policymakers take a human-centred, systems-level approach to AI integration. Cultural evolution, the science of how beliefs, values, norms, technologies and institutions evolve over time, offers a framework for understanding the promises and pitfalls of different approaches to AI in education policy. Using this perspective and drawing on comparative…
Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences
Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Biology (6 works) · Cognitive psychology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)