Luke J. Matthews

Senior Behavioral and Social Scientist; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School

Boston Office

Education

B.S. in biology/anthropology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; M.A. in anthropology, New York University; Ph.D. in anthropology, New York University

One Page Bio

Overview

Luke Matthews is a behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. Much of his work focuses on using formal models for cultural diffusion on social networks to better understand how people influence each other. He has applied social network analysis, simulation models, and machine learning to mixed qualitative-quantitative data.

Matthews first studied cultural diffusion in the social networks of capuchin monkeys in the Ecuadorian Amazon. He subsequently studied diffusion dynamics in systems ranging from ancient human migrations to contemporaneous Christian groups before bringing his experience to the applied sector. His applied work has used both quantitative and qualitative data to examine how culture influences a variety of decisions linked to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Matthews' research has been featured in New Scientist, Science News, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Prior to joining RAND, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and worked in private industry for a startup social network analytics company. Matthews holds a doctorate in anthropology from New York University.

Research Focus

Pardee RAND Graduate School Courses

Cultural Measurement and Analysis in Policy Research

Previous Positions

Senior Scientific Director, Activate Networks Inc., 2011-2014; Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, 2008-2011

Selected Publications

Luke J. Matthews, Werner B. Hertzog, Thanos Kyritsis, Rose Kerber, "Magic, religion, and science: secularization trends and continued coexistence," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2022

Matthews, Luke J., Andrew M. Parker, Katherine Grace Carman, Rose Kerber, and Jennifer Kavanagh, Individual Differences in Resistance to Truth Decay: Exploring the Role of Reasoning and Cognitive Biases, RAND Corporation (RR-A112-17), 2022

Williams, Heather J., Luke J. Matthews, Pauline Moore, Matthew A. DeNardo, James V. Marrone, Brian A. Jackson, William Marcellino, and Todd C. Helmus, Mapping White Identity Terrorism and Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism: A Social Network Analysis of Online Activity, RAND Corporation (RR-A1841-1), 2022

Luke J. Matthews, "Thinking outside the altruistic box: why we need other evolutionary theories to explain why religion is religious," Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 6(1), 2022

Schirmer, Peter, Amber Jaycocks, Sean Mann, William Marcellino, Luke J. Matthews, John David Parsons, and David Schulker, Natural Language Processing: Security- and Defense-Related Lessons Learned, RAND Corporation (PE-A926-1), 2021

Nowak, S. A., C. Chen, A. M. Parker, C. A. Gidengil, and L. J. Matthews, "Comparing covariation among vaccine hesitancy and broader beliefs within Twitter and survey data," PLoS ONE, 2020

Luke J. Matthews, "A moonshot for extraterrestrial communication," Anthropology News, 2019

Ruck, D. J., L. J. Matthews, T. Kyritsis, Q. D. Atkinson, and R. Alexander Bentley, "The cultural foundations of modern democracies," Nature Human Behaviour, 2019

Commentary

Space Exploration

Outer Space and the Veil of Ignorance: An Alternative Way to Think About Space Regulation
There are currently no international binding rules that would address growing threats in space. Without more-defined and enforceable rules of war regarding space and space assets, the danger of a destructive conflict in space grows significantly.
May 9, 2022
Fast Company
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

The Meta-Lessons from COVID-19
COVID-19 has sculpted into high relief already recognized societal problems, which could be addressed once COVID-19 passes. Failure to do so could be a failure to learn the meta-lessons from COVID-19.
Nov 2, 2020
The Pacific Council Magazine

Publications

Journal Article
Cultural Evolution and the Economic Wealth of Nations
This chapter reviews research on the cultural evolution of economic development around the globe, including the relationship between development outcomes and linguistic and religious ancestry.
May 25, 2023
Journal Article
Collective Action by Community Groups: Solutions for Climate Change or Different Players in the Same Game?
This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites—Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations.
Mar 8, 2023
Journal Article
Shared Cultural Ancestry Predicts the Global Diffusion of Democracy
Countries with shared linguistic and religious ancestry have similar democracy outcomes.
Nov 4, 2022
Research Brief
A Dangerous Web: Mapping Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism
The authors reviewed literature on racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE), analyzed social media data from six platforms, and created a global network map to better understand how to inform counter-REMVE strategies online.
Aug 22, 2022
Journal Article
Belief Correlations with Parental Vaccine Hesitancy: Results from a National Survey
We conducted a nationally representative survey of parents' beliefs and self-reported behaviors regarding childhood vaccinations.
Aug 17, 2022
Journal Article
Empirically Identified Networks of Healthcare Providers for Adults with Mental Illness
We develop new measures for care coordination between primary care and psychiatric care specifically for individuals living with serious mental illness.
Aug 17, 2022
Report
Mapping White Identity Terrorism and Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism: A Social Network Analysis of Online Activity
The authors reviewed literature on racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE), analyzed social media data from six platforms, and created a global network map to better understand how to inform counter-REMVE strategies online.
Jun 7, 2022
Report
Leveraging Machine Learning for Operation Assessment
This report shows how machine learning (ML) can support assessment of military operations by describing and illustrating the use of ML in systematically extracting assessment-relevant insights from intelligence, operational, and media reporting.
May 9, 2022
Report
Individual Differences in Resistance to Truth Decay: Exploring the Role of Reasoning and Cognitive Biases
The authors describe development of a survey measure that they used to examine characteristics of human cognitive processing (such as cognitive biases) and assess the results for individual resistance to Truth Decay.
Mar 29, 2022
Journal Article
Magic, Religion, and Science: Secularization Trends and Continued Coexistence
We conducted two studies, an American nationally representative survey and a comparative phylogenetic analysis of religious traditions, to test three hypothesized cultural evolutionary drivers for beliefs in magic.
2022
Draft
Conflicted Information in Conflict Zones: Multidimensional analyses of social and traditional media from two case studies
Studies the patterns of information sharing on both social media and traditional print media in two contemporaneous conflict zones both with postcolonialism historical roots.
Aug 3, 2021
Report
Natural Language Processing: Security- and Defense-Related Lessons Learned
This reference document presents a collection of lessons learned by practitioners from RAND Corporation defense and security projects that employed natural language processing tools and methods.
Jul 28, 2021
Journal Article
Data Activism Against Gender Violence in Latin America
Google searches may help researchers find missing data on gender violence.
Jul 23, 2021
Report
Evaluation of the Military Spouse Employment Partnership Program: Report on the Second Stage of Analysis
In this second-phase study on the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP) program, the authors analyzed jobs on the MSEP Career Portal in 2016, interviewed participating employers in 2016, and then surveyed and interviewed spouses in 2019.
Jul 21, 2021
Report
Messaging Strategies for Mitigating COVID-19 Through Vaccination and Nonpharmaceutical Interventions
This Perspective addresses matching the message, the audience, and the sender in encouraging people to get a COVID-19 vaccine and discusses how to deal with misinformation.
Apr 30, 2021
Report
Can Artificial Intelligence Help Improve Air Force Talent Management? An Exploratory Application
In this report, RAND researchers explore an application of artificial intelligence that would enable the U.S. Air Force to leverage existing data for improved human resource management policies and practices.
Jan 19, 2021
Journal Article
Association Among Trust in Health Care Providers, Friends, and Family, and Vaccine Hesitancy
Parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their children trust various types of individuals along different dimensions of trust.
2021
Journal Article
Thinking Outside the Altruistic Box: Why We Need Other Evolutionary Theories to Explain Why Religion Is Religious
This article reviews and critiques prior explanations for the evolution of religious beliefs and suggests new hypotheses that might be more productive for understanding why religion involves beliefs in the gods and the supernatural.
2021
Journal Article
Women-centered Rituals and Levels of Domestic Violence: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Ritual as a Signaling and Solidarity-Building Strategy
Prior research suggests domestic violence against women to be more common in societies with patrilocality. Women-centered rituals build social solidarity to mitigate domestic violence. We find domestic violence is not particularly associated with patrilocality, but that women-centered rituals appear protective against domestic violence irrespective of post-marital residence pattern.
Aug 11, 2020
Journal Article
The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies
This article identifies which cultural values are closely coupled with changes in democracy across nations in the twentieth century, and tests whether changes in democracy precede or follow changes in cultural values.
Dec 12, 2019
Report
The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare: Social Manipulation in a Changing Information Environment
The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression, which RAND researchers are calling virtual societal warfare in an analysis of the characteristics and future of this growing threat.
Oct 9, 2019
Report
Hostile Social Manipulation: Present Realities and Emerging Trends
The practitioners of hostile social manipulation employ social media, forgeries, harassment, distribution of rumors, and other tools to cause damage to their target state. This report focuses on the information warfare activities of Russia and China.
Sep 4, 2019
Journal Article
A Moonshot for Extraterrestrial Communication
Speculating on recent efforts to establish contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.
Aug 6, 2019
Report
Who Plays, Who Pays? Funding for and Access to Youth Sports
To better understand sports participation rates for middle and high school-aged youths, the funding landscape, and participation barriers and enablers, RAND researchers surveyed parents, school administrators, and community sports program leaders.
Jul 18, 2019
Report
Community Citizen Science: From Promise to Action
In community citizen science, laypeople control research, working with professional scientists and performing research on their own. This report describes its potential uses, implementation needs and challenges, and ways to effect change.
Jun 18, 2019
Journal Article
Dealing with Culture as Inherited Information
Cultural inheritance is important but has been difficult to study (Galton's problem). This chapter illustrates use of new computational methods for doing so, although this will require gathering more cultural data than has been customary.
Jun 11, 2019
Journal Article
Panel Discussion: Moving Social-Behavioral Modeling Forward
This chapter describes panel discussion and debate relating to various multi-scale phenomena in social science, including emergence.
Jun 11, 2019
Journal Article
Book Review of Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity
In this book review I highlight the value of engagement between perspectives from the humanities that seek to improve conceptions of culture with perspectives from the sciences that seek to measure culture.
Dec 27, 2018
Tool
A Manual for Cultural Analysis
Many academic disciplines have formally theorized culture as socially learned information that can influence beliefs and behaviors. This tool combines methods from anthropology and related areas to create a manual to examine cultural data.
Jul 9, 2018
Research Brief
Data and Family Planning: An Evaluation of Two Programs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
This brief summarizes an evaluation of two programs to help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020. Both programs can improve promotion of country-driven agendas for data collection, use, and ownership.
Feb 5, 2018
Report
Evaluation of Two Programs Supporting Global Family Planning Data Needs: Assessing Achievements, Informing Future Directions
This evaluation of two programs that help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020 is based on qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with more than 260 stakeholders in 16 countries.
Feb 5, 2018
Report
Evaluation of Two Programs Supporting Global Family Planning Data Needs: Summary
This report summarizes an evaluation of two programs that help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020.
Feb 5, 2018
Report
The Promise of Community Citizen Science
This Perspective examines the transformative potential of community citizen science for communities, science, and decisionmaking.
Sep 27, 2017
Report
A General Agent-Based Model of Social Learning
This report describes a general agent-based model (ABM) for studying social learning, and uses that general ABM to explore the relationship between micro-influence and macro-dynamics for broad classes of problems.
Mar 31, 2017
Journal Article
A Simulation Assessment of Methods to Infer Cultural Transmission on Dark Networks
This study uses a comprehensive set of simulations to test three statistical approaches commonly used to infer social transmission of beliefs, behaviors, or information on illicit networks.
2017
Journal Article
Mutualistic Cooperation — Why Religion Is Common but Saints Are Rare
This commentary on a larger focus article suggests that religion may improve wellness through mutualistic benefits that do not require truly altruistic cooperation and related cultural signaling systems.
Jul 19, 2016
Journal Article
Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes Among Nation States
Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe.
Jun 6, 2016
Report
Resources and Capabilities of the Department of Veterans Affairs to Provide Timely and Accessible Care to Veterans
The Department of Veterans Affairs health care system, with broad resources and capabilities, provides timely and high-quality care to most, but not all, patients. Meeting veterans' needs over the next five years will require additional capacity.
Dec 31, 2015
Report
Evaluation of the Military Spouse Employment Partnership: Progress Report on First Stage of Analysis
This first of two reports documents the first phase of RAND research to assess the Military Spouse Employment Partnership's progress in supporting military spouse employment and closing the wage gap between military and civilian spouses.
Dec 28, 2015