Dr Elena Miu is a Researcher in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. She is interested in understanding human behaviour, learning, and culture from an evolutionary perspective using a broad set of methods, with a particular focus on the evolution of cultural products. She has a background in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and biology, and has used theoretical modelling and large-scale experimental approaches to study the population-level dynamics of cumulative cultural evolution, as well as the individual-level decisions and learning mechanisms they arise from. She is currently working on questions related to the role of cultural transmission for the spread of low fertility norms using ethnographic data. Dr Miu has been a Guest Editor for this Collection since 2022.
Dr Joseph M. Stubbersfield is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Winchester, UK. He is interested in the role psychology and cognition play in the evolution of culture. Drawing on social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, as well as cognitive anthropology, his research examines how biases in social learning and transmission processes influence both the content and propagation of information. Using a range of methodologies, including experiments, computational phylogeny and qualitative methods, he has used this approach to research and explain the dissemination of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends. Dr Stubbersfield has been a Guest Editor for this Collection since 2020.
Past Guest Editor: Dr Jamshid Tehrani, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, UK (2018-2020). Dr Tehrani was the first Guest Editor of this Collection.