Helena Miton

Research Fellow




Helena’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. 

In her previous works, she has reviewed cultural transmission experiments in an attempt to bridge back these experiments and the theoretical constructs they aim to test, tested hypotheses on how maladaptative medical practices (e.g., bloodletting) can thrive, and on how complexity evolves in graphic communication systems (e.g., heraldry, writing).

Helena received her Ph.D in Cognitive Science from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). Prior to that, she earned a M.S in Cognitive Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Paris Descartes University, and a B.A in Sociology from Paris Sorbonne University. She is an Assistant Professor at Stanford Business School.