Fellowship / Fellows

Felix Warneken

  • 2014–2015
  • Social Sciences
  • Joy Foundation Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Felix Warneken
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Felix Warneken is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. As a developmental and comparative psychologist, he aims to gain insight into human nature by studying young children and our closest evolutionary relatives, especially chimpanzees.

While at Radcliffe, Warneken is working on an integrative theoretical framework to explain the origins of human cooperation. He is planning to synthesize recent empirical research encompassing studies with children through development and across different cultural groups along with cross-species comparisons with chimpanzees. By integrating these lines of work, he aims to elucidate the factors that shape the psychological capacities for human cooperation, as well as to disentangle which aspects have deep evolutionary roots and which are unique to humans.

Warneken studied in Germany and the United States, receiving a doctoral degree from the Universität Leipzig while working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He has received several awards for his research, including an Early Career Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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