HRAF Global Scholar: Erhao Ge, Ph.D.
Title: Lecturer, Department of Sociology
University Affiliation: Central South University, Changsha, China
Research Topic: Mechanisms of cooperation and competition within families and social groups

HRAF Global Scholar Erhao Ge is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Central South University in Changsha, China. Previously he was an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. His work focuses on computational social science, evolutionary anthropology, and human behavioral ecology, with sustained attention to cooperation, religion, social networks, and the emergence of complex societies.

Erhao conducts computational social science research from an evolutionary anthropological perspective. His research focuses primarily on the mechanisms of cooperation and competition within families and social groups, and how cultural patterns adapt to and promote cooperative behavior in specific ecological contexts. Methodologically, he combines economic game theory experiments, mathematical modeling, social network analysis, and population data analysis in his research. He primarily uses R for empirical analysis and he is also familiar with quantitative methods such as Bayesian modeling. His aim is to further understand the evolution of social cooperation through interdisciplinary research and to provide a new explanatory framework for the mechanisms of cultural adaptation and social behavior shaping.

Erhao is currently collaborating with economists who build large-scale regional economic datasets. Their shared goal is to combine quantitative data with systematically coded ethnographic information. The subject-indexed ethnographies in eHRAF World Cultures allow Erhao to extract comparable variables on marriage systems, inheritance rules, ritual frequency, religious institutions, household composition, and subsistence strategies across many societies. With these coded variables he is able to run event-history and multilevel (hierarchical) models to test how cultural institutions mediate fertility, marriage timing, migration, and resource allocation under varying ecological and economic conditions. This provides the unique value of enabling robust cross-cultural inference.

In the future, Erhao plans to incorporate eHRAF World Cultures into concrete training for undergraduate and graduate students. Planned activities include a short course on comparative ethnographic methods, workshops on coding ethnographic content and reproducible analysis (R notebooks), and a hands-on module where students replicate a classic cross-cultural test using eHRAF data. Erhao will produce bilingual teaching materials and open R code so that students and collaborators can learn the workflow and analytical pipelines. In his application for the HRAF Global Scholars program, Erhao stated: “If awarded one-year of eHRAF access, I would use it intensively to advance a programme that links ethnographic knowledge with cross-regional economic and demographic data, both of which can be used for original research and for hands-on teaching.”

HRAF is honored to feature Erhao Ge as one of our HRAF Global Scholars for 2026. We wish him continued success with his research.

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