Welcome! I am a social scientist who studies cooperation and institutions, and how they shape our social and political lives. My current work focuses on how institutions sustain cooperation under uncertainty and conflicting interests. I am also interested in the cultural evolution of norms and values, and the political economy of innovation. More broadly, I seek to understand how individual behavior and beliefs interact with social norms and institutions to produce large-scale social and political outcomes.
Methodologically, much of my research is grounded in Bayesian and computational modeling. This approach expresses substantive theories as generative models and connects them with empirical evidence from surveys, experiments, and observational data. By explicitly modeling the data-generating process and representing uncertainty probabilistically, it aims to provide better explanations and predictions. Computational modeling is a core component of my research agenda and an aspect of my work that I particularly enjoy.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at National Cheng Kung University. Previously, I was a researcher in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture and the BirthRites Lise Meitner Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Feel free to get in touch at yitalu@gs.ncku.edu.tw.