Strong kin networks are associated with weaker democratic traditions and lower contemporary democracy. Historical evidence points to a mechanism: the Western Church's marriage regulations weakened clan-based kinship, while European regions with weaker kin networks were more likely to develop medieval communes and other participatory institutions. The paper received the 2022 Royal Economic Society Prize for the best paper published in The Economic Journal.
Across countries, European regions, and individuals from different cultural backgrounds, longer exposure to the medieval Western Church and weaker intensive kinship are associated with greater individualism and impersonal prosociality and with less conformity. The paper links these patterns to the Church's historical transformation of marriage and family organization.
Using U.S. data from 1850–1940 and quasi-random variation in counties' surname composition generated by historical immigration, we find that greater cultural diversity increased patenting and breakthrough innovation. The evidence points to a broader pool of ideas and skills for recombination and to social interactions that facilitate idea sharing.
In experiments with 2,568 participants across 23 countries, subject pools from societies with more corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud exhibited lower intrinsic honesty. The results are consistent with cultural co-evolution between institutions, social environments, and individual values.
Using nearly 40 million decisions from participants in 233 countries and territories, the study maps broad moral preferences in unavoidable accident scenarios and documents substantial cross-cultural variation in how those preferences are weighted.
With Simon Gächter and Christian Thöni · CeDEx Discussion Paper
Across more than 40 societies, voluntary cooperation in public-goods experiments is positively associated with institutional quality. Laboratory experiments provide complementary causal evidence: experiencing well-functioning institutions subsequently increases voluntary cooperation even after formal enforcement is removed.
With Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich · Review of Economic Studies, Revise & Resubmit
Work in Progress
Cultural Evolution in Economics
With Nathan Nunn and Joseph Henrich · in preparation for Annual Review of Economics
Economics increasingly treats preferences, beliefs, and institutions not as primitives but as products of culture — socially transmitted information that evolves over time. We review the exchange between economics and the field of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution offers a formal framework that provides microfoundations for endogenous preferences, beliefs, and heuristics that economic models often take as given. These foundations help understand the emergence of social norms and institutions and their co-evolution with psychology, while explaining both cultural persistence and change. Economics contributes empirical strategies and a large body of evidence for identifying culture's causal footprint—natural experiments, discontinuity and epidemiological designs, and experimental methods in the field and laboratory. This line of research helps explain phenomena that standard models alone cannot: deviations from rational choice, belief systems such as religion and zero-sum thinking, why similar institutions perform differently across societies, and the cultural roots of innovation, growth, and the wealth of nations.
Beliefs That Bind: Religion and Shared Moral Order
With Firoz Ahmed and Andreas Pondorfer
Scholars have long argued that religion helps sustain social order by binding individuals into a shared moral community. Yet this coordinating role has rarely been tested directly. We test it in a lab-in-the-field experiment with 720 participants in rural Bangladesh. Participants are randomly exposed to a moralizing Islamic figure (Pir), a traditional supernatural agent (Gunin), or neither. We measure honesty and elicit both personal moral views and injunctive norms—participants’ beliefs about how acceptable others in their community consider dishonesty. Making the Pir salient increases honesty and strongly shifts injunctive norms, while having little effect on participants’ own moral views. It thereby closes about 40 percent of the pluralistic-ignorance gap; the Gunin has no comparable effects. Reanalyzing published data from 15 diverse societies and religions, we find further evidence that the coordinating role of moralizing religion extends beyond our experimental setting. Our findings provide evidence that moralizing religion can align communities around common moral expectations, helping sustain a shared moral order.
Intuitive Cooperation in Children across Societies
With Y. Dunham, E. Mandelbaum, K. McAuliffe, and D. Rand
We investigate whether the tendency to cooperate intuitively — without deliberation — varies systematically across societies and how this relates to cultural and institutional variation. Using a cross-cultural sample of children, we test whether cooperative intuitions are universal or culturally shaped.
