Radim Chvaja, Ph.D.

Radim Chvaja is a member of ERUNI Open Research Ostrava and an external member of the Department of Social Science Policy at the European Research University. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Masaryk University and is currently a postdoc at the University of Otago (New Zealand), where he is studying the relationship between religion, reproduction and demography as part of an international project. His work, however, is mainly concerned with the question of fostering intra-group cooperation and trust and the role that religious beliefs and rituals play in this, which places his research at the intersection of behavioural economics, social psychology, anthropology and evolutionary biology. He primarily uses experiments in the laboratory and in the field, complemented by observational and longitudinal study methods, to answer his research questions. He has conducted his field research on the island of Mauritius and in northern Spain, for example, and as a PhD student at Masaryk University in Brno he has been involved in teaching and several internal research and education projects. During his studies he also received an internal student grant from Masaryk University in Brno and a student grant from the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association. He has published in reputed journals in the top quartile.