This Scholars Award in Methodological Training for a cultural anthropology researcher will allow him to gain sufficient expertise in agent-based modeling and evolutionary game theory to engage in an active research program applying these methods to important problems in cultural and ecological anthropology. These methods are of growing importance in various fields in the social and biological sciences, and provide a common framework for much current interdisciplinary research on behavior and adaptation. The Principal Investigator will collaborate with senior colleagues who have expertise in these methods, at the Santa Fe Institute and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Evolutionary game theory and agent-based modeling provide complementary tools for analyzing social processes in terms of their .micro-foundations (the actions and motivations of individuals) and dynamics (how change and stability are determined). The substantive focus of this project is on collective action problems and the emergence of inequality in the context of small-scale (non-stratified) human societies. The central research questions to be addressed include 1) the social and ecological conditions which might favor the development of individually costly but group-beneficial norms through processes of within-group status competition and bargaining; 2) the roles of enforcement, signaling, partner choice, and linguistic communication in solving collective action problems; 3) and the elaboration of game-theoretical frameworks for analyzing the effects of resource control, status competition, and inter-group conflict in the emergence and stability of institutionalized sociopolitical inequality. Broader impacts of the proposed research include enhancing the effectiveness of interdisciplinary collaboration on important topics of interest to many social scientists and behavioral biologists by framing analyses in terms of modeling methods used across these disciplines; and offering insights into the generation and solution of collective action problems (e.g., management of resources held in common) that may be of value for applied social science; as well as helping generate tools for more effective teaching of social and biological science concepts, particularly through the use of simulation methods that invite active learning.
