PI Luke Glowacki
Boston University
About our Research
We are an interdisciplinary group based at Boston University studying how humans produce complex social structures. The components to build our social systems were already in place among our hunting and gathering ancestors. What were they? How and why were they combined to unleash seemingly limitless possibilities to the scale of cooperation and organization we are capable of?
Much of the complex social behavior we produce emerges from bottom-up decision-making. Just as sub-cellular processes can give rise to complex emergent structures and behavior, humans also produce emergent phenomena unintentionally, such as the structured villages seen in the satellite imagery above. We focus on understanding social systems as emerging from the decisions of individuals interacting within a social environment.
We prioritize understanding behavior in its real-world context. Thus we rely heavily on naturalistic field studies and maintain a long-term fieldsite among traditional populations in southwest Ethiopia.
Recent News
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PhD student Bhavya Vadavalli participates in the Complex Systems Summer school at the Sante Fe Institute.
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PhD student Bhavya Vadavalli presents her research on the evolution of human social structure at the School for Collective Intelligence at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.
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Postdoc Maud Mouginot's research on bonobos and chimpanzee aggression published in Current Biology and covered in the New York Times and National Geographic.
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Paper on the gendered division of labor among hunter-gatherers published in Evolution and Human Behavior.
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Article on the evolution of peace published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
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HSB Lab member Dithapelo Medupe wins the New Investigator Award at the 2023 Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) conference.
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Paper on conflict resolution in a small-scale society published in Evolution and Human Behavior.
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Paper on Human social organization in the Late Pleistocene wins the Margo Wilson Award for best paper in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2022.
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PI Luke Glowacki awarded an NSF Human Networks and Data Science program grant for $447,000 to study intergroup relationships in Ethiopia.
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New paper on cross-cultural patterns in speech and music to children published in Nature Human Behaviour and covered in the New York Times.
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How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation published in Current Opinion in Psychology.
Contact Us
Mailing Address
232 Bay State Road
Department of Anthropology
Boston University
Boston, MA 02215
laglow 'at' BU 'dot' edu