Personal information
Biography
My research interests lie in the evolution of social behaviour (cooperation, coordination) and social organization (hierarchy, institutions).
My PhD investigates the evolutionary origins of hierarchy, leadership and despotism in human groups. On one side, hierarchy seem imposed by leaders for their own advantage. On the other side, hierarchy appears to be a group adaptation to organize at low cost. We propose that hierarchy and its two ambiguous group effects both emerge from the evolution of individual capacities to influence. To understand the mechanisms involved, we simulate evolution of human populations and explicitly describe how individual influence affects collective decision-making. Such bottom-up approach aims to provide mechanistic explanation for the origin of hierarchy and deeper insights into its effects on human evolution.
Ultimately, this work contributes to (i) understand the evolution of human societies and (ii) to design efficient artificial societies.
The models are based on evolutionary theory and game theory, use evidence from human sciences and lead to applications in artificial life and multi-agent systems. Reflecting these aspects, I am strongly interested by interdisciplinary knowledge and projects. To cite few side projects:
- Evolution of hierarchy using mathematical and game theory models
- Online data to understand human social organisation
- Application in multi agent systems, sociotechnical systems and evolutionary robotics