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Dr. Michael Muthukrishna

Research Lead, Cities, Culture, & Technology

Michael Muthukrishna is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology, STICERD Developmental Economics Group Affiliate, Affiliate of the Data Science Institute, and founder of Culturalytik at the London School of Economics. Michael has won several awards for this research, which focuses on how culture affects innovation, corruption, decision-making, and how we can best navigate diversity and cultural differences. Michael’s research and interviews have appeared in a variety of international and national news outlets including CNN, BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Scientific American, PBS, Vice, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Nature News, and Science News, and in the UK in the Times, Telegraph, Mirror, Sun, and Guardian. Michael’s research is informed by his educational background in engineering and psychology, with graduate training in evolutionary biology, economics, and statistics, and his personal background living in Sri Lanka, Botswana, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is the author of A Theory of Everyone: Who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. Follow him on Twitter @mmuthukrishna.

Publications

  • Muthukrishna, M. (2023). A Theory of Everyone: Who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. MIT Press (US & Canada) / Basic Books (World English)
  • Schimmelpfennig, R., Spicer, R., White, C., Gervais, W. M., Norenzayan, A., Heine, S., Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (2024). Methodological Concerns Underlying a Lack of Evidence for Cultural Heterogeneity in the Replication of Psychological Effects. Communications Psychology
  • Schnell, E., & Muthukrishna, M. (2024). Reply to Gross et al.: Indirect reciprocity undermines large-scale cooperation under realistic conditions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Schnell, E., & Muthukrishna, M. (2024). Indirect Reciprocity Undermines Indirect Reciprocity Destabilizing Large-Scale Cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Schimmelpfennig, R., Spicer, R., White, C., Gervais, W. M., Norenzayan, A., Heine, S., Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (2024). The Moderating Role of Culture in the Generalizability of Psychological Phenomena. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
  • Slingerland, E., Monroe, M. W., & Muthukrishna, M. (2023). The Database of Religious History (DRH): ontology, coding strategies and the future of cultural evolutionary analyses. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1-30.
  • Falk, C. F. & Muthukrishna, M. (equal first) (2023). Parsimony in Model Selection: Tools for Assessing Fit Propensity. Psychological Methods, 28(1), 123. [Awarded “Excellence in Quantitative Methods Research Award”, Canadian Psychological Association]
  • Uchiyama, R., Spicer, R. & Muthukrishna, M. (2022). Integrating cultural evolution and behavioral genetics. [Reply to commentaries]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • Schimmelpfennig, R., Razek, L., Schnell, E., & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). Paradox of Diversity in the Collective Brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377.
  • Schaller, M. & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). 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, 76(6), 1027–1038.
  • White, C. J. M., Muthukrishna, M. (equal senior), Norenzayan, A. (2021). Worldwide evidence of cultural similarity among co-religionists within and across countries using the World Values Survey. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (37) e2109650118.
  • Uchiyama, R., Spicer, R. & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability. [Target article]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-147.
  • Muthukrishna, M., Henrich, J. & Slingerland, E. (2021). Psychology as a Historical Science. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 717-49.
  • Henrich, J. & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 207-40.
  • Muthukrishna, M., Bell, A. V., Henrich, J., Curtin, C., 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. [related app: world.culturalytics.com]. Psychological Science, 31(6), 678-701.
  • Muthukrishna, M. & Schaller, M. (2019). Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 24(2), 103-120.
  • Muthukrishna, M. & Henrich, J. (2019). A Problem in Theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 221-229.
  • Muthukrishna, M., Francois, P., Pourahmadi, S., & Henrich, J. (2017). Corrupting Cooperation and How Anti-Corruption Strategies May Backfire. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(0138).
  • Levine, J. S., Muthukrishna, M., Chan, K. M. A., & Satterfield, T. (2016). Sea otters, social justice, and ecosystem-service perceptions in Clayoquot Sound, Canada. Conservation Biology, 31(2), 1523-1739.
  • Muthukrishna, M. & Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the Collective Brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1690).
  • Muthukrishna, M., Morgan, T. J. H., & Henrich, J. (2015). The When and Who of Social Learning and Conformist Transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37(1), 10-20.
  • Levine, J., Muthukrishna, M., Chan, K. M. A., & Satterfield, T. (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).
  • Muthukrishna, M., Shulman, B. W., Vasilescu, V., & Henrich, J. (2013). Sociality influences cultural complexity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1774).