PI Luke Glowacki
Boston University



About our Research
We study how humans produce complex social systems, including the norms, practices, and institutions that they require. The components to build our complex social systems were already in place among our hunting and gathering ancestors—what were they, and how and why did they get combined to unleash seemingly limitless possibilities to the scale of cooperation and organization we are capable of?
Much of the behavior we are interested in emerges from bottom-up decision-making. Just as sub-cellular processes can give rise to emergent structures and complex 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 individuals with biological and psychological inheritance interacting within a social environment. Our major questions concern collective behavior, social institutions, and the origins of violence and warfare.
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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Key individuals catalyze intergroup violence published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biological Sciences.
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How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation published in Current Opinion in Psychology.
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Beginning Summer 2021 we are moving to Boston University's Department of Anthropology!
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Music as a Coevolved System for Social Bonding published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
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Our paper Universality and Diversity in Human Song published in Science. Media coverage: Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine.
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Luke Glowacki awarded the 2019 New Investigator Award for the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association.
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The New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic cover our paper in Current Biology.
Contact Us
Mailing Address
232 Bay State Road
Department of Anthropology
Boston University
Boston, MA 02215
laglow 'at' BU 'dot' edu
Glowacki 'at' fas 'dot' harvard 'dot' edu