Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Dr Drew Altschul

Lecturer in Psychology

Background

I am lecturer in psychology, where I currently study the evolution of individual psychological differences. I have a variety of interests across the fields of animal cognition, comparative psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and health psychology. I take an evolutionary, phylogenetic approach to much of my research; where possible I compare humans with close evolutionary relatives, such as chimpanzees, as well as biomedical model organisms, like rhesus macaques.


Prior to becoming a lecturer at Newcastle, I was based at the University of Edinuburgh, where I completed my PhD under the supervion of Alexander Weiss and Ian Deary. I continued on as a research fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (2017 - 2018), research associate with an MRC Data Pathfinder project on mental health (2018-2020), later seconded to the Wellcome Trust COVID-19 taskforce as part of the GenerationScotland team (2020). Lastly, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2024).


Research

My research can be roughly divided into 4 main areas.


Dominance heirarchies, behavioural assertiveness, and the evolution of power seeking


Human beings appear remarkable non-aggressive when we consider the deeply hierarchical and despotic societies of our primate relatives. Virtually all of our closest African ape relatives live lives much more ruled by dominance and submission than we humans do. How did humans come to be this way? And what is the persisting legacy of dominance heirarchies in our psyche? I use a variety of human and non-human approaches to study these questions from evolutionary, anthropological, social, cultural, and developmental perspectives.


The coevolution of primate personality and other individual differences


A "Big Few" personality traits are remarkably consistent between humans and closely related species, like chimpanzees, bonobos, and other apes. The personality of most ape species have been carefully systemitized, but there is much we do not understand about how other traits support these psychological traits. To this end, I study the covariation of primate personality with a variety of other traits, such as the morphological (face shape), social (rank), and life history (longevity and reproductive success).


Big Team Science (BTS), Open Science (OS), and Meta-science approaches to doing comparative psychology


I am an active member of the ManyPrimates and ManyMany BTS collaborations, both of which aim to conduct cross-species studies that can be analysed phylogenetically, in order to understand the evolution of crucial cognitive and behavioural capacities. BTS goes hand in hand with OS; our projects (and my own) do our best to follow OS best practices regarding study registration, material accessibility and transparency, etc. I am also a member of multiple BTS Many Analyst and Meta-science projects.


Best practices in statistical inference in the evolutionary and psychological sciences


I use a variety of analytic approaches including latent variable modeling, Bayesian analysis, machine learning, causal reasoning and more, in order to address questions of interest as effectively as possible, given limited resources.


However, I have many other interests beyond these, as attested by my publication record. If you have something you'd like to discuss, feel free to get touch.


My google scholar page is here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mU9A3dgAAAAJ&hl=en

Teaching

PSY2004 - Individual Differences


Publications