About this Fellow
Andrew Whiten is Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, and is past and founding Director of the Centre for Social Learning and Cultural Evolution. His research interests focus on social cognition, in the last two decades particularly the topics of social learning, traditions and the evolution of culture. These topics are pursued through interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate ethological and experimental studies of a wide range of non-human primates as well as humans, especially children. He was elected a Fellow of the international Cognitive Science Society in 2013 (~100 Fellows worldwide). He has been awarded the Rivers Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Osman Hill Medal of the Primate Society of Great Britain, and is the first and only scientist to receive both the senior life sciences prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the James Black Medal, and its Senior Prize and Medal for Public Engagement. He was the senior author of the proceedings of the joint British Academy and Royal Society meeting, "Culture Evolves", in 2011, and from 2011-2013 chaired the Academy's main Research Awards Committee.
Appointments
Current post
- Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology and Wardlaw Professor, University of St Andrews
Past Appointments
- Lecturer, Reader in Psychology, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, University of St Andrews, 1970
- Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, University of St Andrews, 1970
- Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology and Wardlaw Professor, University of St Andrews, University of St Andrews, 1997
Publications
Potent social learning and conformity shape a wild primate’s foraging decisions. Science, 6131, 483-5. 2013
The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 367 2119-2129. 2012
Experimental studies illuminate the cultural transmission of percussive technology in Homo and Pan. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 370, 20140359. 2015
Cultures in chimpanzees Nature, 399, 682-5. 1999
Other Psychology Fellows
Professor Daniel Kahneman
The psychology of judgment and decision-making; the nature and measurement of well-being
Professor Margaret Snowling
Developmental disorders of language, learning and cognition including basic research on dyslexia and language impairment and the development and evaluation of interventions that ameliorate children’s literacy difficulties
Dr Karalyn Patterson
The organisation of language and memory in adult humans, as revealed primarily by the impact of brain disease or injury, and including comparisons of English and Japanese languages
Professor Stanislas Dehaene
Experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience of human higher cognitive functions: language, reading, mathematics; brain mechanisms of conscious versus non-conscious processing
