Michael Muthukrishna is Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and New York University. He is also Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, Affiliate of the LSE Data Science Institute, Fellow at the Charter Cities Institute, Chief Science Advisor at the AI startup Electric Twin, Technical Director of the Database of Religious History, and founder of LSE Culturalytik, the London School of Artificial Intelligence, and the Center for Human Progress. He is further a board member of the One Pencil Project, Attain, Besample, and the International Behavioural Public Policy Association (IBPPA).
He studies how culture turns individual minds into collective intelligence, and how we can turn that intelligence into human progress, using mathematical, computational, experimental, and data science methods drawn from psychological and behavioural science, economics, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence.
His research focuses on explaining how humans became the most dominant species on the planet; why, despite this, we often fail to solve problems we already know how to solve; and how to apply this knowledge to tackle related topics including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, the navigation of cross-cultural differences, governance and policy innovation, and how humans can best work with artificial intelligence.
He has been invited to speak to companies large and small around the world, to governments and NGOs, and at world-leading centres of academic excellence including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Oxford. His research and interviews have appeared in international outlets including CNN, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Scientific American, Nature News and Science News, and in the UK in The Times, Telegraph and Guardian.
His book A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going was published by MIT Press / Basic Books in September 2023.
Expertise: culture; cultural evolution; diversity; innovation; behavioural science; corruption; intelligence; cooperation; human performance; cross-cultural psychology; economic psychology; human evolution; data science
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