Biography

University of Utah - Anthropology

Assistant Professor at University of Utah
Research
Adrian
Bell
Salt Lake City, Utah
Our long, successful, and continuing story of migration across the globe attests to the extraordinary adaptability of humans. Part of our success likely lies in our ability to learn information pertinent to individual and group well-being. Adopting majority behavior, maintaining ethnic markers, and other similar strategies are broadly favored by theory, though the empirical program is lagging. To fill the gap, I conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Polynesian people of Tonga in the Tongan islands and the Tonga diaspora. My objective is to test whether learning strategies can explain the cultural variation I see among Tongan migrants in Utah, the Western U.S., and other parts of the world.

Specialties: Tongan ethnography, evolutionary game theory, statistical methods