Evolutionary Culture Lab

This lab is coordinated by Drs. April Becker and Aecio Borba. The Evolutionary Culture Lab investigates how cultural practices emerge, persist, and change over time, and how these dynamics shape the behavior of individuals embedded within them. A central focus is the tension between individual choice and collective interest, examining how selection processes at the level of practices and behaviors can either align or conflict with the needs of groups, communities, and societies as a whole.

The lab also examines pressing issues of inequality and resource overuse, asking how cultural and behavioral patterns contribute to the unequal distribution and unsustainable consumption of shared resources, and how these patterns might be understood and addressed through a behavioral lens.

A further area of interest is the role of organizational structures, broadly defined, in shaping the contingencies that influence individual behavior. By studying how institutions, rules, and social arrangements interact with behavioral processes, the lab seeks to understand how environments can be designed to support more adaptive and prosocial outcomes.

Finally, the lab takes a long-term view by studying cumulative cultural development, exploring how human societies evolve over time as practices are selected, combined, and transmitted across generations, thereby building increasingly complex forms of social organization.

Current research interests include the sthe exploration of experimental preparations for the study of common-pool resources, social transmission, and decision-making processes.