Research
Publications and Accepted
Social Context and the Evolution of Empathy. Evolution and Human Behavior. Vol. 47 (3), May 2026 Link PDF
How does social context influence the evolution and behavioral expression of empathy? Experimental evidence consistently shows that empathy increases with social closeness. Using evolutionary game theory, I examine how empathy evolves in various social-economic ecologies. I situate the evolutionary game on a network with distinct social and economic layers and define empathy as cooperating conditional on social proximity. The results reveal that when interactions occur among both familiars and strangers, discriminatory empathy outperforms unconditional cooperation, but when interactions occur only among strangers, empathy produces no cooperation. These findings highlight the behavioral consequences of modern human ecologies characterized by anonymity and provide insights for designing institutions and structuring human ecologies that better foster cooperation.
Working Papers
The Social and Cultural Effects of Markets: Evidence from Folklore and Ethnography. PDF
The social and cultural consequences of markets have long been debated. Part of the difficulty in empirically investigating this topic lies in obtaining data that cover an array of societies with diverse social, cultural, and economic configurations. Folklore and ethnography provide this. Folklore reflects a people’s internal worlds and external environments from an emic perspective. Ethnography depicts a people from an etic perspective. I employ folklore text from the Berezkin catalogue of folklore motifs and ethnographic text from the HRAF World Cultures database to analyze the social and cultural effects of markets. Cultures that tell more stories about markets tend to tell more stories about prosociality, morality, and stratification and fewer stories about nature. In ethnography as well, markets are associated with prosociality (though not morality), stratification, and anthropocentrism. To assess the direction of causality, I assemble a global dataset of ancient trade routes and hubs, from which I derive a measure of historical trade exposure for each society. Using this measure as an instrument for the text-based market indices, I find that causality runs from markets to culture and social structure. Lastly, I develop a separate ethnographic index for capitalism and show that the social and cultural correlates of capitalism are distinct from those of markets.
Markets and Prosociality: A Theoretical Synthesis and Meta-Analysis. PDF
In this paper, I seek to clarify the ambiguities and resolve the apparent contradictions on the relationship between markets and prosociality by assembling a theoretical framework and conducting a meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Using a theoretical synthesis of evolutionary theory, game theory, and political economy, I argue that markets represent social, psychological, and economic situations that influence both the evolution and the behavioral expression of social preferences. I compile the findings of 242 experiments and employ a meta-regression approach to analyze the within-study effects of anonymity, ephemerality, market framing, and country-level market exposure on prosociality. The meta-data reveal a negative effect of market-related contexts on prosociality but no effect of market exposure.
Works in Progress
A Unifying Framework for the Evolution of Cooperation
Incorporating Power into Evolutionary Game Theory (with Paul Nasca)
The Evolution of Racism and Racial Identity (with Paul Nasca and Elissa Braunstein)
Indigeneity and Sustainable Ecological Relationships: An Evolutionary Theory
Identity, Stigma, and Power in Social Movements (with Corrina Fuller, Shravika Mittal, and Enock Appia Tieku)