Welcome! I am a social scientist whose research examines the evolution of cooperation and culture, and how these dynamics shape our social and political life. My current work focuses on political competition and cooperation in heterogeneous groups, the cultural evolution of norms and values, and the political economy of innovation. More broadly, I seek to understand how individual behavior interacts with social norms and institutions to produce large-scale social and political outcomes.
Methodologically, much of my research is grounded in Bayesian statistical and generative modeling. It bridges theoretical models — including directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), game-theoretic models, and agent-based simulations — with empirical evidence from surveys, experiments, and observational data. By explicitly modeling the data-generating process and representing uncertainty probabilistically, this approach yields analyses that are both theoretically grounded and empirically informative, with strong explanatory and predictive power. Computational modeling is a core component of my research agenda and an aspect of my work that I particularly enjoy.
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.