PhD studentship in experimental cultural evolution

University of Bristol - Archaeology and Anthropology

The project:

The effects of social transmission biases on human cultural evolution

This project will advance our understanding of cultural evolution by taking an experimental approach to examining three main categories of bias in social transmission: the effects of what we learn, from whom we learn and how we learn.

The successful student will collaborate with a team of researchers to create and implement an experimental protocol that will examine the relative effects of biases in social transmission such as survival bias, social bias, prestige bias and transmission pathway bias. Experiments will be carried out in the UK (Bristol), USA (Colorado), Germany (Jena) and Australia (Canberra), with the aim of generalizing the experimental design to diverse populations around the globe. A second-phase pilot project is intended to run in Vanuatu during the three-year project in which the student may collaborate, subject to progress.

This is an exciting opportunity to engage with researchers in cultural evolution, anthropology, ecology, and language sciences. As well as being hosted in the supportive research atmosphere of the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Bristol, the student will have the opportunity to establish research connections at the new Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

The student will conduct their research under the supervision of Dr Fiona Jordan University of Bristol, and engage with a research group of PhD students and postdocs as part of ERC-funded “Cultural Evolution of Kinship” project, starting May 2015.

They will also be advised by Dr Michael Gavin (Colorado State University), Dr Simon Greenhill (Australian National University) and Professor Russell Gray (Director, MPI-SSH).

For more information please see the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities funding pages. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/gradschool/funding/

Candidate requirements: 

• Have a disciplinary background in a social science such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics or another relevant field.
• M-level qualification in a relevant subject as well as an undergraduate
• Be familiar with experimental research methods involving human participants, and be motivated to design and implement cultural evolution experiments.
• Be willing and able to travel internationally: to the USA and Germany for project meetings, and (subject to progress) to Vanuatu for run experimental tasks. Travel, subsistence, and research costs will be covered by the project.