Stavros Anagnou

I’m interested in cognition, society, and how the two shape each other. My doctoral research — a PhD on normative adaptive systems at the University of Hertfordshire — examined how bio-cognitive processes and their constraints, particularly noise and uncertainty, co-evolve with social rules and norms, using evolutionary computing, agent-based modelling, and evolutionary game theory.

The question running through this work is a reciprocal one. How do the processes of social maintenance that underpin norms, such as punishment and positive reinforcement, shape cognitive and affective mechanisms? And how do those mechanisms feed back into norms, perhaps offering ways to nudge agents stuck in undesirable states into more desirable configurations of behaviour? Along the way I’ve looked at how normative processes such as punishment may have shaped affective mechanisms over evolutionary time, and how cognitive biases and bounded perception — usually treated as defects — counterintuitively facilitate the emergence of institutions. A central outcome of my thesis is a conceptual framework for detecting norms across humans, animals, and artificial agents. My background is in behavioural biology (BSc, University of Sussex), including a year abroad at Purdue University with electives in philosophy and classics, followed by an MSc in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems, also at Sussex. During my PhD I worked with Peter R. Lewis as a Mitacs Globalink scholar, applying game theory to the emergence of institutions.

Going forward, my main interest is in turning these tools outward, from explanation to design: using artificial life and complex systems approaches to understand how we might build computational infrastructure that genuinely benefits humanity and enhances social capital. If norms, trust, and institutions emerge from the interaction of bounded agents under noise and uncertainty, then the infrastructure we build is not a neutral substrate but part of the selective environment. I want to understand what that implies for designing systems that cultivate cooperation and collective capacity rather than eroding them.

In my spare time I write and perform spoken word, satirising — among other things — the tech world, its obsession with measurement, and the perverse incentives that follow. “Optimising happiness,” for example, and the murky ethical waters it leads us into.