bsky.app/profile/mich...

The role is based in New York, starting this summer.

Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/183820

Please share with your networks!

You don’t need all of these disciplinary backgrounds, but you should be someone who finds it natural to move between individual cognition, population dynamics, and engineered systems.

evolutionary game theory & the evolution of cooperation; mechanism design and institutional design; cooperative AI and multi-agent systems; the study and development of large language models; cross-cultural psychology and large-scale behavioral data; philosophy of morality or social contract theory.

We’re especially excited about candidates with backgrounds or serious interest in one or more of: computational modeling of social learning, norms, or moral cognition; cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution;

We are looking for someone with a PhD (or are close to completion) in computer science, computational cognitive science, or any quantitative science, and a genuine interest in working across disciplinary boundaries.

These synchronic models of moral cognition will be complemented by diachronic models of how moral consensus emergence and expands over cultural evolutionary time. The diversity of human values are themselves continually evolving - how might they coevolve with AI agents?

and designing and testing methods for aligning individual AI agents to user values in ways that reflect how humans transmit those values and align to one another.

You would answer this question by building & testing models, developing multi-agent simulations where agents, aligned to different users’ values, must coordinate, negotiate, and resolve conflicts,

To offer a glimpse of the kind of questions and approaches you would be working on, consider the question of how the mechanisms of cooperation operate at scale, how are they made concrete in moral norms, and can analogous mechanisms be engineered into multi-agent AI systems?

As a postdoc, you will work with us and our networks to use ideas from cultural evolution and moral cognition to think more clearly about AI alignment, cooperation, norm formation, negotiation, and value conflict in multi-agent systems.

Now we are building AI systems that face many of the same problems, only faster, stranger, and with fewer inherited constraints.

Human societies solved an tough version of the multi-agent alignment problem: getting millions, eventually billions, of people to cooperate, coordinate, & enforce shared norms. Those solutions were built over generations through culture, institutions, moral systems, and the cognitive machinery.

How do you align AI in a world of plural, conflicting, and evolving human values?

A starting point is human society itself.

@sydneylevine.bsky.social and I are hiring a postdoc at NYU to combine insights from cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety.

Please share widely!1/

@michael.muthukrishna.com and I are hiring a postdoc to join our labs at NYU!  We're looking for someone excited to work on one of society's newly emerging and potentially generation-shaping challenges: the multi-agent alignment problem.

Highly educated people from non-WEIRD countries are culturally similar to WEIRDos, research by White & @michael.muthukrishna.com suggests (and this is not the case for high income or subjective social status individuals):

buff.ly/V8JYs52

Higher education linked to Western cultural values worldwide Higher education is linked to Western cultural values worldwide, according to new research co-authored by LSE analysing data from 95 countries.

📚️ Does education make you WEIRD?

New research co-authored by @michael.muthukrishna.com suggests that, around the world, higher levels of education are linked to cultural values commonly found in the US, the UK, other Anglo‑industrialised countries, and Western Europe.

"There are reasons that people adopt this worldview and perhaps a bit more empathy would go a long way in understanding this type of thinking instead of dismissing it as irrational." -- Sahil Chinoy

📢CfP: The Cultural Evolution of Migration and Diversity conference @wzb.bsky.social

We want to bring together cultural evolution scholars & social
scientists to explore how evolutionary perspectives can contribute to empirical research on migration & diversity.

Keynote by @michael.muthukrishna.com

In a recent @timeshighered.bsky.social article, Professor @michael.muthukrishna.com highlights the lack of opportunity for academics to take their research where it can inform decision-making. Our @academicsbureau.bsky.social initiative tackles this issue: academicspeakersbureau.com

The CBS Superlab What is the CBS Superlab? With the release of the ACBS Task Force Report on the Strategies and Tactics of Contextual Behavioral Science Research, high-level discussion around how to roll out the propo...

You can register here: contextualscience.org/the_cbs_supe... @myacbs.bsky.social @michael.muthukrishna.com

Octopuses prompt rethink of why animals evolve big brains A popular idea suggests a link between big brains and a rich social life, but octopuses don't fit the pattern, which suggests something else is going on

This is a fascinating bit of research diving into why some octopuses have larger brains than others. #science #intelligence #evolution
It was great talking to @michael.muthukrishna.com, @pkatz.bsky.social and Robin Dunbar about this for @newscientist.com
🧪 🦑 🧠

www.newscientist.com/article/2512...

In our latest free teaching resource, we explore #AI and #socialsciences with researchers from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the UK.
futurumcareers.com/the-future-o...

@michael.muthukrishna.com @eugeniedugoua.bsky.social @lizstokoe.bsky.social

December 1: Household. Household is a cornerstone unit in Western economics. It is a locus of income, consumption, and decision-making. But in some cultural contexts — for example, in rural Malawi — households often diverge from the idealized Western “household” model. Families can be spatially dispersed, household membership fluid, major decisions follow matrilineal / patrilineal kinship lines. So in Malawi, kin social networks and resource flows often capture economic reality better than the Western household template. (Ansell & van Blerk, 2004; Meijer, 2015; Sassi, 2023) Behavioral scientists — let’s open our doors and minds to the wider world. Join Besample to research beyond the West!

Starting the countdown to Christmas with Besample's very own Advent Calendar of Insights from Beyond the West — 24 daily reminders that the world is bigger, more diverse, and far less WEIRD than many behavioral scientists assume.

This one was gifted to us by our advisor @michael.muthukrishna.com

One-size-policy-recommendations-do-not-fit-all.

Our North Star (or Southern Cross) is simple:
Leave no mind behind.

Grateful to colleagues at @UNDPasiapac and to the global group of scholars who contributed. A genuinely international effort at a critical moment.

www.undp.org/asia-pa...
13/15

But AI can drive development and narrow gaps - we offer differentiated policy roadmaps:

• By starting point
• With steps at time horizons: 0–12 months, 1–2 years, 3–5 years
• And by sector (health, education, finance, agriculture, biodiversity, governance)
12/15

As well as real and potential opportunities:

• AI tutors in remote or multilingual settings
• Diagnostics in clinics without specialists
• Climate and disaster modelling for Pacific Island countries
• SME credit access through alternative data
11/15

We discuss AI development traps, such as:

• Dependency on foreign cloud/models
• Automation without productivity
• Pilots that never scale or can't without dependence on ongoing foreign investment
• Limited ability to govern or adapt systems
10/15

The report discusses the risks and opportunities across 3 channels:

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 People: Uneven access to health, education, security, and data visibility
💱 Economy: Divergent productivity gains and job exposure
🏛️ Governance: Big differences in state capability, trust, and readiness
9/15

Even within countries, the GDP per capita of Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai are similar (~$30,000) while the GDP of the poorest Malaysian state, Kelantan, would rank in the lower half of an Asia-Pacific countries list.
8/15