Lisa Faessler
Hello!
My name is Lisa Faessler. I am a researcher in cultural evolution and organizational behavior.
I received a Ph.D. in Management from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In my thesis, I explore how evolution has shaped human cognition and social learning and what that means for the diffusion of behaviors today.
I’m currently doing a postdoc on organizational culture with Christian Zehnder at the University of Lausanne. I am part of the Organisational Behavior department and 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.
