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I am an evolutionary anthropologist broadly interested in social learning, cooperation and cultural evolution in humans and other animals. My recent work has been focusing on norm operation mechanisms and norm evolution dynamics. Specially, I am investigating 1) how norms direct individual behaviors through culturally acquired preference, socially constructed payoff structure and biased strategy transmission, and 2) how selective, demographic and cognitive forces impact whether a norm changes, how fast it changes, and which equilibrium it lands on. To address these questions, I construct mathematical models and conduct surveys and economic games in both subsistence and industralized societies.
In my dissertation, I used analytical and simulational models to show that continuous norms and discrete norms have different stability properties and follow different shift trajectories. Inspired by this theoretical finding, I established my field site with the Derung in Yunnan, China, a minority group currently experiencing market integration, to understand how people in small-scale subsistence societies make norm decisions, and to track the change in Derung people's normative behaviors and attitudes longitudinally. My ultimate goal is to link the micro-level mechanisms, i.e., the individual norm decision making algorithms, with the macro-level patterns, i.e., norm change in a society. Using the same theoretical framework, I studied how the residents in Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas made decisions on mask wearing, interpersonal distance and greeting styles during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how such decisions influenced the regional pandemic transmission patterns.
Minhua Yan CV
In my dissertation, I used analytical and simulational models to show that continuous norms and discrete norms have different stability properties and follow different shift trajectories. Inspired by this theoretical finding, I established my field site with the Derung in Yunnan, China, a minority group currently experiencing market integration, to understand how people in small-scale subsistence societies make norm decisions, and to track the change in Derung people's normative behaviors and attitudes longitudinally. My ultimate goal is to link the micro-level mechanisms, i.e., the individual norm decision making algorithms, with the macro-level patterns, i.e., norm change in a society. Using the same theoretical framework, I studied how the residents in Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas made decisions on mask wearing, interpersonal distance and greeting styles during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how such decisions influenced the regional pandemic transmission patterns.
Minhua Yan CV
Publications
Tiokhin, L., Yan, M., & Morgan, T. J. (2021). Competition for priority harms the reliability of science, but reforms can help. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(7), 857-867.
Field Work
I spent 20 months living with Derung people in village D (upstream) and village M (downstream) from 2018 to 2021. My dissertation work covered four norms and focused on cooperative farming division, a norm with continuous variants that differs in upstream and downstream Derung. I elicited the villagers' behaviors and attitudes through surveys, semi-structured interviews, economic games, and behavioral recording.
My research (and survival) would not have been possible without the support from my field assistants, host families, and the local people. The National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology funded the work.
Field Work
I spent 20 months living with Derung people in village D (upstream) and village M (downstream) from 2018 to 2021. My dissertation work covered four norms and focused on cooperative farming division, a norm with continuous variants that differs in upstream and downstream Derung. I elicited the villagers' behaviors and attitudes through surveys, semi-structured interviews, economic games, and behavioral recording.
My research (and survival) would not have been possible without the support from my field assistants, host families, and the local people. The National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology funded the work.
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Field Team Front row left to right: Li Xianlan, Yan Minhua, Li Yuanmei Back row left to right: Bi Jianfen, Long Chunxiang, Li Zhizhong |
