Principal Investigator

Charles Efferson

Professor

Faculty of Business and Economics
University of Lausanne

Email Google Scholar ↗ ResearchGate ↗ GitHub ↗

Biography

Charles is an evolutionary ecologist squarely focused on the evolution of human social cognition and human social behavior. Although he takes evolutionary ecology as an overarching framework, his research draws from anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology.

Charles routinely mixes modeling with the analysis of both experimental and observational data. He has conducted fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and on-line experiments in Armenia, Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, Sudan, Switzerland, and the United States.

Charles is in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne . He is co-director of LABEX , together with Adrian Bruhin and together with Laurent Lehmann and Luís Santos-Pinto he also runs the inter-faculty MSc program in Behaviour, Economics, and Evolution . Charles is also a CESifo Research Network Affiliate .

Grant Four

Funding body

2024–2028

CHF 0.5 million

Grant Three

Funding body

2024–2027

CHF 0.75 million

Grant Two

Funding body

2022–2023

CHF 200K

Grant One

Funding body

2021–2025

CHF 250K

2026

The (anti-)conformity strategy space: How flexible is social learning when group membership and incentive alignment vary?

von Flüe, L., Efferson, C., Vogt, S

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Charles Efferson

Biography

Grant Four

Grant Three

Grant Two

Grant One

The (anti-)conformity strategy space: How flexible is social learning when group membership and incentive alignment vary?

Credible Leadership signals

Activating cultural evolution for good when people differ from each other

The cover of randomness: validating implicit methods for the study of sensitive topics

How culture shapes choices related to fertility and mortality: Causal evidence at the Swiss language border

Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia

Super-additive cooperation

Identifying culture as cause: challenges and opportunities

When norm change hurts

Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability

Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies

Green preferences sustain green washing: challenges in the cultural transition to a sustainable future

Activating cultural change for good in heterogeneous populations

A market for integrity: the use of competition to reduce bribery in education

Group identities can undermine social tipping after intervention

What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space?

Pre-existing fairness concerns restrict the cultural evolution and generalization of inequitable norms in children

Tipping pro-environmental norm diffusion at scale: opportunities and limitations

Promotion of behavioural change for health in a heterogeneous population

Investigating the structure of son bias in Armenia with novel measures of individual preferences

Policy to activate cultural change to amplify policy

Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data

The evolution of distorted beliefs versus mistaken choices under asymmetric error costs

The promise and the peril of using social influence to reverse harmful traditions

Economic Psychology

Behavioural homogenisation with spillovers in a normative domain

Simple moral code supports cooperation

The error of God, revisited

Redefine Statistical Significance

The risk of female genital cutting in Europe: Comparing immigrant attitudes toward uncut girls with attitudes in a practicing country

One-shot reciprocity under error management is unbiased and fragile

The evolution of facultative conformity based on similarity

Changing cultural attitudes on female genital cutting

Sustained cooperation by running away from bad behavior

Female genital cutting is not a social coordination norm

Eye spots do not increase altruism in children

Impartial institutions, pathogen stress, and the expanding social network

Can we see inside? Predicting strategic behavior given limited information

Viewing men’s faces does not lead to accurate predictions of trustworthiness

A review of a cooperative species: Human reciprocity and its evolution by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Are religious individuals more generous, trusting, and cooperative? An experimental test of the effect of religion on prosociality

Wrath of God: Religious primes and punishment

The subtleties of error management

The coevolution of cultural groups and ingroup favoritism

Beyond existence and aiming outside the laboratory: Estimating frequency-dependent and payoff-biased social learning strategies

Prey-producing predators: the ecology of human intensification

Conformists and mavericks: The empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission

Other-regarding preferences in a nonhuman primate: Common marmosets provision food altruistically

New methods in quantitative ethnography: Economic experiments and variation in the price of equality

A prolegomenon to nonlinear empiricism in the human behavioral sciences

Learning, productivity, and noise: An experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano

Evidence for local specialization in a generalist mammalian herbivore, Neotoma fuscipes

Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning

Cultural evolution in laboratory microsocieties including traditions of rule giving and rule following

Exploring Gender Differences in the Acceptability of Digital Agricultural Tools: Experimental Evidence from Rural India

Social tipping our way – or maybe not – to some kind of future

(Anti-)conformity in three dimensions: Social learning in the space between simple heuristics and general-purpose reasoning

The limits of digital advisory services: Evidence from a field experiment in Madhya Pradesh

Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri parents in Soviet-era Russia

Super-Additive Cooperation

Leading with the (recently) successful: performance visibility and the evolution of risk taking

A market for integrity – an experiment on corruption in the education sector

Studying Different Types of Social Influence in Isolation Distorts Our Understanding of How Humans Learn From Each Other