Welcome! I'm a social scientist fascinated by how culture, cooperation, and innovation evolve, and how these dynamics shape our contemporary social and political world. My research explores topics such as social dilemmas in political contexts, the political economy of innovation, and the cultural evolution of fertility transitions. This work bridges the rapidly growing field of cultural evolution with the broader social sciences and draws extensively on computational and Bayesian statistical modeling — one of my core areas and something I genuinely enjoy.
In studying social dilemmas in political contexts, I investigate how cooperative behavior emerges and breaks down when individuals with diverse interests face common external threats. These strategic processes can interact with the cultural evolution of innovation, influencing political and economic development and, through them, well-being and inequality. I also examine how cultural factors influence reproductive behavior over time, uncovering the causes of fertility transitions that define modern societies and carry profound implications for population change, social mobility, and long-term development. Ultimately, my work seeks to understand how we adapt, cooperate, and innovate together, socially and politically.
I have an interdisciplinary background in political science, economics, and physics, and was previously affiliated with the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture and the BirthRites Lise Meitner Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, in May 2021.
Feel free to get in touch at yitalu.tw@gmail.com.