Why Humans Cooperate

Abstract:  Humans are unique in being both heavily dependent on social learning and highly cooperative. Research over the last 30 years examining the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution suggests that these two features—culture and cooperation—are deeply intertwined. While the consideration of such culture-gene coevolutionary processes are taken seriously for understanding many aspects of the human phenotype, and represent the leading view in some cases, the origins of human cooperation and ultra-sociality remain a flashpoint. Drawing on evolutionary modeling, cross-cultural and cross-species experiments, laboratory studies of social learning and quantitative ethnographic work on social life in small-scale societies, Henrich argues that cultural evolution, driven by competition among social groups, has shaped human genetic evolution and the emergence of our unique social psychology. This approach allows researchers to tackle otherwise puzzling aspects of human prosociality, institutions, religion and social norms, as well as giving us a purchase to grapple with the broadest patterns in human history.

Biography:  Joe Henrich holds the tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution at the University of British Columbia, where he's appointed in both the Departments of Economics and Psychology. His theoretical work focuses on understanding how human learning gives rise to cultural evolution and the emergence of norms and institutions, as well as how cultural evolution has influenced the genetic evolution of human brains, cognition and sociality. Methodologically, his research synthesizes experimental tools and analytical techniques drawn from behavioral economics and psychology with in-depth quantitative ethnography, and has performed long-term fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, rural Chile and in Fiji. His work has been published in the top journals in biology, anthropology, psychology and economics, including Science, Nature, American Antiquity, Current Anthropology, American Economic Review and Behavioral and Brain Sciences.                           

After receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology at UCLA in 1999, Henrich was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Scholars at the University of Michigan Business School. In 2001-2002 he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, working with an interdisciplinary group on social norms. From 2002 to 2006, he was in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University during which time he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award, the highest award bestowed by the United States upon scientists and engineers early in their careers. In 2007, he published Why Humans Cooperate, co-authored with Natalie Henrich. In 2009, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society awarded him their Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions.