Bailey House

Research Database

Personal Website: http://www.baileyrhouse.com/

Bailey studies decision-making and behaviour in adults and children, how these vary across diverse societies, and how they are shaped by both cultural beliefs and evolved adaptations. In particular, he explores the development of both prosocial behaviours (e.g. sharing, generosity) and the psychology for reasoning about social norms. His goal is to understand how culturally variable social norms and beliefs motivate human behaviour.

Bailey's background is very interdisciplinary. After doing his undergraduate thesis in cognitive psychology at Hampshire College, he worked in research laboratories specializing in both developmental and comparative psychology. Bailey completed his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, where his dissertation combined evolutionary anthropology with cross-cultural, developmental, and comparative psychology. After my PhD, he continued to do postdoctoral work in these areas at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and at the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University.