Please join us Thursday, May 11, 2023 for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability's Social Sciences Division Seminar featuring Dr. Joseph Henrich.

Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Social Sciences Seminar Series

1:00-2:00pm 

Thursday, May 11, 2023 

Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy (Y2E2) Building, Room 299

Joseph Henrich, Ph.D.

Ruth Moore Professor

Department of Human Evolutionary Biology

Harvard University

“Foundations of Sustainable Behavior: Culture, Prestige and Social Norms"

Sustainable behavior often involves individual actions with short-term costs that may or may not generate long-term, widely shared benefits. Free-riders, uncertainty, large groups and delayed benefits make sustaining such behaviors particularly prickly examples of collective action dilemmas. With these challenges in mind, this talk will draw together insights from the emerging field of cultural evolution, an approach to human behavior and psychology that explicitly incorporates roles for cultural transmission, social norms and our evolved psychology. First, drawing on both laboratory and field evidence, Joseph Henrich will examine our species' reliance on adaptive forms of cultural learning that powerfully drive the adoption of costly behaviors, modify our preferences and influence our decision-making. Second, building on research into the nature of human status, Henrich will show how prestige transforms the calculus of cooperative behavior and thereby offers important opportunities to establish cooperative institutions. Finally, integrating theoretical insights from cultural evolutionary game theory with detailed ethnographic and experimental studies, Henrich will discuss the diverse social mechanisms that culture has jury-rigged to sustain costly and often cooperative social norms. Of particular interest are norms related to impersonal prosociality (cooperation with strangers), which underpin rates of voluntary blood donations, rule compliance, and the effectiveness of voluntary associations. Historically and cross-culturally, to foster the norms that underpin large-scale cooperation, cultural evolution has harnessed kinship, religion, markets, and various forms of intergroup competition, including inter-firm competition. Broadly, understanding how cultural evolution has managed to scale up human cooperation by several orders of magnitude over the last ten millennia offers numerous potential insights that can inform our efforts to scale it up once again.