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 and Capitalism: Evidence from Folklore and Ethnography. PDF
How do markets and capitalism influence prosociality, morality, ecocentrism, and stratification? I employ global folklore text and ethnographic text as data to analyze the social and cultural effects of markets and capitalism. I construct indices for social, cultural, and economic characteristics based on the textual prevalence of relevant words and themes and apply regression analysis to these indices. The results suggest that markets and capitalism are associated with decreased ecocentrism and increased stratification and that, in folklore, markets are associated with increased moral content. Additionally, while markets are weakly associated with increased prosociality, capitalism is associated with decreased prosociality. I also estimate the markets coefficients using distance from historic trade route as an instrument, supporting a causal interpretation.
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
Social Media Restriction and Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials (with Joel McGuire and Samuel Dupret)
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)