The 2023 prize was awarded to Dr Joseph Henrich from Harvard University for his research on how collective thinking drives cultural innovation.
Dr Henrich holds the Ruth Moore Professorship in Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Prior to his tenure at Harvard, he served as a professor in Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia for nearly a decade, holding the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution.
Dr Henrich employs evolutionary theory to explore the relationship between human psychology, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution. Through this lens, he has investigated various topics, including economic decision-making, social norms, fairness, religion, marriage, kinship, prestige, cooperation and innovation. His methodological approach combines rich ethnography with experimental techniques from economics and psychology. More recently, he’s begun utilizing global datasets and natural language processing to study cultural and psychological changes that unfold over centuries. He has conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork in locations like Peru, Chile, and the South Pacific and has led major comparative research projects. Remarkably, Dr Henrich has earned tenure and professorships in four different fields: anthropology, psychology, economics, and human evolutionary biology. At Harvard, he is affiliated with both the Psychology Department and the Kennedy School.
After earning his PhD from UCLA in 1999, Dr Henrich was honoured with the Presidential Early Career Award for Young Scientists and Engineers by the National Science Foundation in 2004. In subsequent years, he received multiple accolades, including the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society (2009), the Wegner Prize for Theoretical Innovation from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2018). Between 2010 and 2019, he was a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, specifically within the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth group, and in 2021 he became a fellow in the Cognitive Science Society. In 2023, KU Leuven, a leading university in Belgium, awarded Professor Henrich an honorary doctorate.
He gave his results lecture, a year on from winning the Prize at Panmure House on Wednesday 1 May 2024.
5 май 2024
