Alejandro Pérez Velilla

Welcome. I am an anthropologist and cognitive scientist with an interest in how learning, culture and environmental conditions affect the ways we make decisions. Some of the subjects I work on are social learning and cooperation under risk and uncertainty, the formation of social and economic networks within communities and the emergence and effects of generational trauma. My collaborators and I strive to combine game-theoretic and agent-based modeling along with long-term fieldwork in order to produce testable hypotheses about these subjects that can be contrasted with naturalistic data.

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Publications

Work In Progress

Pérez Velilla, A., Padilla, K. J., Cassiani Cervantes, D., Herrera, Y., Hernández, A., Hurtado Manyoma, A., Dalla Ragione, A., Ross, C. T. Speaking Against Extinction: Super-speakers and children as pillars of Palenquero language resilience.

Pérez Velilla, A., Smaldino, P. The cultural group selection of optimal sharing norms.

Pérez Velilla, A., Ready, E. The emergence of sharing networks through indirect signaling.

Pérez Velilla, A., Nöldeke, G., Peña, J. Reciprocity and the evolution of risk-reduction sharing.

2025

Pérez Velilla, A., Beheim, B., & Smaldino, P. E. (2025, January 31). The development of risk attitudes and their cultural transmission. SocArxiv.

2024

Smaldino, P. E., Pérez Velilla, A. The evolution of similarity-biased social learning. Evolutionary Human Sciences. 2025;7:e4. doi:10.1017/ehs.2024.46

Smaldino, P. E., Moser, C., Pérez Velilla, A., & Werling, M. (2024). Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(2), 454-464.

2022

Pérez Velilla, A., Moser, C. J., & Smaldino, P. E. (2022). Hidden clusters beyond ethnic boundaries. Behavioral & Brain Sciences.

Contact

aperezvelilla@ucmerced.edu
github

cv