Professor Michael Muthukrishna's work featured in the Philip Leverhulme Prize Collection

Explore Professor Michael Muthukrishna's work as part of the Philip Leverhulme Prize Collection.

Michael Muthukrishna is Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE and NYU and a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. He is an expert on human and cultural evolution, and his research focuses on answering three broad questions:

• Why are humans so different to other animals?
• What are the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and social change, and how is information transmitted, maintained, and modified?
• How can the answers to these questions be used to tackle some of the challenges we face as a species?

Michael is also the author of A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, where he argues that humanity’s unique capacity to create and transmit culture has driven our dominance, and that understanding the fundamental laws of life — energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution — is key to addressing our global challenges.

His work is being featured as part of EXPeditions Philip Leverhulme Prize Collection. EXPeditions is an open-access digital publishing platform bringing world-class researchers and academics to the public in ways that are engaging, accessible and intellectually rigorous.

Explore Michael's work through three unique videos, courtesy of EXPeditions and the Leverhulme Trust:

What makes us human?

One of the enduring questions for humanity is what makes humans so different from other animals. The answer to that question is that we discovered a new source of information to guide our behaviour that untethered us from mere genes, or just what information we could acquire in our lifetimes.

The collective brain

Innovations are not the product of innovators per se any more than your thoughts are the product of a particular neuron. Innovators sit in a social network, in a collective brain, where ideas are flowing around, recombining and reconnecting.

A theory of everyone

We need a deeper understanding of human psychology, behaviour and social change. We really need a theory of everyone.

Other LSE scholars that have been featured by EXPeditions include Ricky Burdett, Jonathan White, Lea Ypi and Emily Jackson.