The Institute of Psychology invites you to a lecture by Harvey Whitehouse, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford:

“Our evolved psychology predisposes us to submission, belief and belonging. Over thousands of years of cultural evolution, these predispositions have been shaped and expanded by the development of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, human nature is leading us into a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier wars, and environmental destruction. The lecture will explain how our evolutionary biases have shaped humanity's past and threaten its future. Taking us deep into New Guinea tribes, Libyan militias, Brazilian soccer fans, and predatory advertising agencies, I argue that the tools we once used to manage our biases are breaking down, with disastrous consequences for all of us.”

Harvey Whitehouse has spent four decades investigating some of the world's most extreme groups: from the battlefields of the Arab Spring, to millenarian cults in the Pacific Islands, to violent soccer fans in South America. Along the way, he undertook research at some of the world's most important archaeological sites, brain scanning centers, and child psychology laboratories - all with the goal of pioneering a scientific approach to the study of human society. At Oxford, he heads the Center for the Study of Social Cohesion and is the founding director of Seshat, a massive database of human history that enables scholars and scientists to test hypotheses about the rise and fall of human civilizations. His latest book, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, will be published in June by Penguin Random House.