Cognitive and Information Sciences
Quantitative and Systems Biology
University of California, Merced

Office: SSM 255B
Email: psmaldino@ucmerced.edu
Google Scholar
Bluesky

Who I am
I am a Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences and faculty in the Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate program at UC Merced, where I am also affiliated with the Center for Analytic Political Engagement, the Center for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, and the Health Sciences Research Institute.  Extramurally, I am an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna.  

What I do
I study how behaviors emerge and evolve in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures, as well as how those pressures can themselves evolve. I work at the intersection of cognitive science, social science, and evolutionary ecology, and particularly in the emerging field of cultural evolution. I have broad interests related to categorization, communication, cooperation, collective behavior, and complex systems. Much of my work involves building and analyzing mathematical models and computer simulations, supplemented with behavioral experiments and analysis of online datasets. 

Cultural evolutionary theory was largely developed to explain core social phenomena—like learning, communication, cooperation, and norms—among Pleistocene foragers. I am particularly interested in applying and extending the tools and theories of cultural evolution to the contemporary world, characterized by diversity and globalization, new information architectures, AI and algorithmic biases, inequality, climate insecurity, and rapidly changing institutions. I am perhaps best known for my work on the cultural evolution of scientific institutions, my work connecting identity signaling with norms of assortment and social learning, and my pedagogical work on formal modeling. 

Books
My textbook, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution, was published in Fall 2023 by Princeton University Press. The book provides a unified, theory-driven introduction to key mathematical and agent-based models, teaching readers how to build their own models, analyze them, and integrate them with empirical research programs. In the words of one reviewer, “This book is poised to become a foundational text for the future of quantitative and computational social science.”

With Bret Beheim, I am currently writing a new textbook: Mathematical Foundations of Cultural Evolution, under contract with Princeton University Press. Starting from first principles, the book derives, step by step, the key formal models for how socially transmitted information changes in populations, and connects those models to the broader logic of evolutionary, ecological, and demographic processes. Our aim is to make the mathematical structure of cultural-evolution models transparent and up-to-date for contemporary researchers, as well as highlight different assumptions in the literature about cognition, learning, population structure, demography, and environmental change. 

Onwards and upwards
If you poke around this site, you can learn some more things about me, check out my publications, and in general see the sorts of things we’ve come to expect from the personal websites of academics.