Daniel Hruschka

My work asks how we as humans make our culture and how culture makes us human. How does our culture influence the way we face tough ethical decisions or deal with serious illness? How do we transform culture by the force of both our best efforts and our unintentional actions? I approach these questions as an anthropologist, but I borrow pragmatically from across the social sciences, adapting and developing the tools—qualitative and quantitative, observational and experimental, analytical and agent-based—that are best suited for each specific question. Much of my work focuses on developing novel ways of framing and testing the wealth of hypotheses in the social sciences about two specific questions—how humans stay healthy and how humans cooperate.