Dr Oliver Scott Curry is Chief Science Officer for Kindlab, at kindness.org. He is also a Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, at the London School of Economics. He received his PhD from LSE in 2005.
Oliver’s academic research investigates the nature, content and structure of human morality. He tackles such questions as: What is morality? How did morality evolve? What psychological mechanisms underpin moral judgments? How are moral values best measured? And how does morality vary across cultures? To answer these questions, he employs a range of techniques from philosophy, experimental and social psychology and comparative anthropology.
His work argues that morality is best understood as a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. This theory of ‘morality and cooperation’ uses evolutionary game theory to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions; and it predicts that rules regarding cooperative behaviour – such as caring for family, helping one’s group, reciprocating favours, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting property – form the basis of all human morality.
Oliver has tested the theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ by means of a comprehensive analysis of the ethnographic records of 60 societies, and by developing a new self-report measure of moral values – the Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q). This research suggests that these seven moral rules are not only evolutionarily ancient, but also psychologically distinct, and cross-culturally universal.
As CSO for Kindness.org, Oliver and his team are working to answer such questions as: Why are people kind? How kind are people, really? Why aren’t people kinder? What are the most effective kind acts you can do? And, how can we make the world a kinder place? This research involves pure and applied research on the causes and consequences of kindness.
In addition to his research, Oliver has taught courses on evolution and human behaviour, covering evolutionary theory, animal behaviour, evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural psychology, statistics and research methods.
He has consulted for organisations including: Ogilvy (on the science of gift giving) and the European Commission (on the science of values).
You can follow Oliver and his work on: Twitter, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, YouTube, ImpactStory, and the Open Science Framework.