Lisa Faessler
Hello!
My name is Lisa Faessler. I am a researcher in cultural evolution and organizational behavior.
I received my Ph.D. in Management from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In my research, I study how evolution has shaped human cognition and the consequences for group behaviors today. My broad interests include social learning, social norms change, and organizational culture.
I’m currently an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility research fellow at Aarhus BSS, in the Management Department. I’m affiliated with the ICOA, where I collaborate with Dorthe Håkonsson and Erik Larsen on the preservation of the commons in Maasai Mara, Kenya. I’m also a member of the PaceLab.
My research
My research focuses on the evolution of social learning and decision-making, along with applications related to collective problem-solving. I use lab experiments, evolutionary modeling, and econometrics techniques to better understand social learning mechanisms and their consequences on the aggregate level, both on a global scale and within individual firms.
In my last paper, I isolate the causal effect of culture. Many of us are comfortable with the notion that, somehow, culture influences behaviors. However, from a strictly empirical perspective, separating the effects of culture from these confounds can often be difficult or impossible. Using a cultural border in Switzerland and a regression discontinuity design, my co-authors and I demonstrate the potential role of culture in shaping stable differences between groups, that cannot be genetic, environmental, or institutional. Further, we specifically isolate cultural effects of this sort in decision-making domains related to health and fertility.
