Sam Passmore

Sam Passmore is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, within the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI).

Sam is an interdisciplinary researcher who has worked in fields such as Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics, and Economics. His research focuses on cultural macro-evolution and diversity using quantitative and statistical methods. Sam has used cultural macro-evolution to understand the movement and history of a variety of cultural phenomena such as: kinship, language, music, environmental behaviours, political and economic structure, and religion.

Sam completed his PhD at the University of Bristol (UK). His thesis explored the diversity and evolution of kinship terminology finding that existing typologies underestimate global diversity, and finding evidence against universal patterns of kinship terminology change. More recently, Sam has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck institute for the Science of Human History (Germany), studying global diversity in linguistic grammar, and at Keio University (Japan) examining signals of cultural history in traditional folk music.