
Portrait of Ingela Alger, CNRS Silver Medal 2022, Research Director at the TSE-Research laboratory, specialist in the long-term evolution of human motivations and intra-family behaviors
Ingela Alger's research focuses on understanding the origins of our preferences and motivations by combining economic theory with evolutionary biology. In 1997, with her PhD in economics in hand, she flew to the United States to embark on an academic career. In 2012, she joined the CNRS, at the Toulouse School of Economics, as director of research. Her work shows that evolution rarely leads to the purely selfish "homo oeconomicus", but rather favors a new class of preferences, called "homo moralis", which would lead individuals to evaluate their choices according to the world as it would be if a part of the population opted for the same choices. More recently, she is questioning the influence of certain factors from our evolutionary past in shaping our intra-family behaviors, such as paternal investment and the sharing of resources between women and men. She is also, since 2021, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.
Silver Medal 2022: Ingela Alger, economist: by Carole Mainguy © CNRS - 2022