People
Principal investigator
Nichola Raihani
Nichola is PI of the Social Evolution and Behaviour Group at UCL. She is Professor of Evolution & Behaviour, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Her research explores the mechanisms that underpin cooperation among non-relatives in nature, with a particular focus on the roles of punishment and reputation-based partner choice.
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Elisavet Pappa
Elisavet is an ESRC funded PhD student in the Division of Psychiatry at UCL. Her research uses experimental methods to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of perceiving anomalous social agents in psychosis and the impact on social functioning. Eli’s PhD tackles three important questions: (1) What are the characteristics of illusory social agents in psychosis? (2) To what extent do psychotic symptoms predict over-detection of social agents? (3) How does the presence of illusory social agents affect social functioning on the population level?
Supervisor: Dr Vaughan Bell
Co-supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
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Matija Franklin
Matija is a PhD student in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Matija’s research explores people’s judgments of AI and how these judgments compare to their judgments of people. He is also exploring a series of paradigms that relate to human-AI interaction and is involved in a series of projects trying to apply behavioural and psychological insights to policy as well as workplace behaviour, productivity and wellbeing.
Primary supervisor: Prof. David Lagnado
Co-supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
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Nicole Engeler
Nicole is a PhD student on the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain. Her research primarily focuses on reputation management in the real world. She aims to use ecologically valid methods such as experience sampling and field-based experiments to study humans in their natural, complex environments.
Primary supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
Co-supervisor: Dr Mark Dyble
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Alumnus: Gabriel Hudson
Gabriel is a PhD student whose primary interest concerns the proximate psychological mechanisms that motivate prosocial behaviour in humans. His research focuses on the evolutionary psychology of the emotions, their motivational properties, and their interpersonal moderators. Gabriel plans to use behavioural experiments that examine the effect of evolutionarily salient factors upon both empathy and guilt.Primary supervisor: Prof. Nichola RaihaniSecondary supervisor: Prof Ruth Mace -
Alumnus: Dr Jonathan Bone
Jonathan’s PhD explored punishment and cooperation in humans, asking if and when punishment could ever be used to promote cooperative behaviour. His PhD was passed with minor corrections and produced five first-author publications in international, peer-reviewed journals. Jonathan now works as a quantitative researcher at Nesta.
Supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
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Alumnus: Dr Jack Andrews
Jack’s research is focused on social brain development during adolescence and the reasons why this age group represents a sensitive period for sociocultural processing and the onset of mental health problems. Jack is now a Research Fellow at UNSW.
Primary supervisor: Prof. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Secondary supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
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Alumnus: Dr Anna Greenburgh
Anna’s research explored psychosis and the evolution of the social brain. She now works for The Early Intervention Foundation.
Primary supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
Co-supervisor: Dr Vaughan Bell
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Alumnus: Dr Sarah Peacey
Sarah’s research explores the role of reputation in human cooperation. She is not based in UCL’s Department of Anthropology as a Research Fellow.
Supervisor: Prof. Ruth Mace
Co-supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani
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Alumnus: Dr Elena Zwirner
Elena recently completed her PhD on ‘Urban-rural variation in cooperative behaviour’ at UCL. Her research focused on the mechanisms underpinning urban-rural variation in prosocial behaviour in humans. She used a combination of laboratory and real-world experiments to establish whether city-dwellers are less cooperative than their rural counterparts and, if so, why.
Supervisor: Prof. Nichola Raihani