Professor Alex Mesoudi

Alex Mesoudi is Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus. He conducts research into human cultural evolution, in which cultural change is studied as an evolutionary process, and human social learning, the processes by which we learn from other people. He runs lab experiments and constructs theoretical models investigating human social learning biases - who learns what, from whom, when and why - and how these generate and maintain large-scale cultural change and diversity.

Many of these experiments and models have examined past human technology, aiming to explain change and diversity in artifacts such as arrowheads or handaxes. Other work has looked at why only humans appear to possess cumulative cultural evolution, where knowledge is accumulated over successive generations, as well as contemporary phenomena related to social learning such as copycat suicide, pop music and football tactics. More recent work has involved studying migrant communities, using immigration as a natural experiment for identifying the drivers of inter-generational cultural change and stasis.