The Collaboratory is a cross-institutional research group, in which we wish to advance our understanding of questions around cooperation, altruism, decision-making and social behaviour. We do this by bringing together researchers with theoretical backgrounds and experimental back grounds within the fields of maths, statistics, economics, biology and psychology.

The idea for The Collaboratory first emerged when Oliver Hauser and Christian Hilbe met at Harvard University some time around 2014. Oliver was working on his PhD and Christian was working as a postdoctoral researcher. Their first collaborative project, published in Nature in 2019, got them thinking more about the fascinating intersection of evolutionary theory and behavioural experiments to study and better understand human behaviour.

When they both moved to Europe to continue their careers and began building up their teams to push forward this interdisciplinary research agenda, they began to foster this collaboration more deeply by co-supervising PhD students and postdoctoral researchers and establishing regular exchanges and visits between the University of Exeter and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. On this website, you can find out more about the team members behind The Collaboratory and all the exciting outputs and publications that have resulted over the years.

If you are interested in joining this interdisciplinary and cross-institutional group, please reach out – we look forward to hearing from researchers at all career stages!