Michael Muthukrishna

Michael Muthukrishna is a multi-award-winning Professor of Economic Psychology at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and New York University. He is also Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, Affiliate of the LSE Data Science Institute, Fellow at the Charter Cities Institute, Chief Science Advisor at the AI startup Electric Twin, Technical Director of the Database of Religious History, founder of LSE Culturalytik, the London School of Artificial Intelligence, and the Center for Human Progress. He is also a board member of the One Pencil Project, Attain, Besample, and the International Behavioural Public Policy Association (IBPPA).

He studies how culture turns individual minds into collective intelligence and how we can turn that intelligence into human progress using mathematical, computational, experimental, and data science methods from psychological and behavioural science, economics, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence. More specifically, his research focuses on: explaining how humans became the most dominant species on the planet; why, despite this, we often fail to solve problems we already know how to solve; and how to apply this knowledge tackle a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, navigation of cross-cultural differences, governance policy innovation, and how humans can best work with artificial intelligence.

He has been invited to speak to companies large and small around the world, governments and NGOs, and at world-leading centres of academic excellence, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Oxford. Audiences have included judges, policy-makers, members of the military, government officials, and key industry figures across a variety of industries.

His awards include the HBES Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and the HBES Rising Star Award (Human Behavior and Evolution Society), APS Rising Star (Association for Psychological Science), CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research), the Inaugural Grand Challenges for Human Flourishing Award (Templeton World Charity Foundation), the SAGE Emerging Scholar Award (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), and the Leverhulme Prize.

Professor Muthukrishna makes the science of human and cultural evolution more accessible through animations, videos, documentaries, and other popular media. His research and interviews have appeared in a variety of international and national news outlets including CNN, BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Scientific American, PBS, Vice, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Nature News, and Science News, and in the UK in the Times, Telegraph, Mirror, Sun, and Guardian.

Professor Muthukrishna's research is informed by his educational background in engineering and psychology, with graduate training in evolutionary biology, economics, and statistics, and his personal background living in Sri Lanka, Botswana, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Canada, United States, and United Kingdom. His book A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, published by MIT Press and Penguin Random House, was published by MIT Press / Basic Books in September 2023.