ORCID: 0000-0002-6523-5471
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities at the National University of Singapore, where I work on the project “Ethics and the Evolution of Punishment.” My research uses philosophy of biology, moral psychology, and philosophy of social science to study normative cognition and its role in human cooperation. I examine how humans acquire, evaluate, justify, and enforce norms, and how these capacities support social coordination under conditions of disagreement, uncertainty, and social complexity.
I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Australian National University under the supervision of Kim Sterelny. Before joining NUS, I was a Research Associate at Marco F. H. Schmidt’s Normativity Lab at the University of Konstanz, an SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Rebekka Hufendiek’s Research Group at the University of Bern, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. I was also a Research Fellow in Michael Tomasello’s Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and a Monbukagakusho scholar at the University of Tokyo, where I worked in Yoshiyuki Hirono’s Lab.
My research has been featured in here and here. My paper “The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation,” co-authored with Prof. Michael Tomasello, has been awarded with the Springer-Nature’s Change the World, One Article at a Time Award in the Life Sciences and Biomedicine. I also occasionally blog.
Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera 