I’m an anthropologist with broad multidisciplinary interests. My research tackles how cultural norms and values influence decision-making. My work combines insights and methods from anthropology, cognitive science, and economics.
I have done research on:
- Decision-making
- Cultural norms and cooperation
- Social and institutional change
- Common resource management
- Reputation systems
- Credit network
- Ritual (what drives people to perform costly rituals?)
- Cultural/cognitive foundations of ethnicity and nationalism
Some of the above research appears in my Ph.D. dissertation (soon to be out).
To a minor extent, I have also worked on:
- Linguistics (Mayan)
- Religious beliefs (how do beliefs spread?)
- Language and cognition (does language influence thought? If so, how?)
- Kinship (how do kinship systems change? How do kinship networks and influence decision making?)
Some research methods I use:
- Cultural domain analysis (and various multivariate techniques)
- Behavioral experiments/games to index decision-making preferences
- Social network analysis
- Ethnography
I have worked in:
- Mexico (for my Ph.D. Research)
- Brazil (pre-Ph.D.)
- the United States
Aside from English, I speak:
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Tzotzil-Maya
Main software interests:
- R (intensely interested since 2010)
- SQL
- GIS
- ODK
