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Staff Profile

Dr Francesca De Petrillo

Lecturer in Psychology

Background
I received my Ph.D. in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, with a focus on Anthropology, from the University Sapienza of Rome, Italy, where I compared economic decision-making strategies across adults, young children, and non-human primate species to shed light on the evolutionary origins and developmental trajectories of human decision-making. I then completed two postdoctoral fellowships, first at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France. During this period, I compared decision-making and cognitive control across multiple primate species, including rhesus macaques, Barbary macaques, and lemurs, to test how socioecology shapes cognition. 
Research

My research investigates the evolutionary and developmental origins of cognition and behaviour, with a particular focus on how individuals acquire and use information from the physical and social world to make decisions. I am interested in how variation in cognitive abilities and decision-making strategies relates to differences in life history, ecology, social structure, and developmental experience. I address these questions using comparative approaches across human and non-human primates. My research examines decision-making, executive control, and risk-taking in different primate populations, including captive capuchin monkeys, free-ranging macaques, and several species of lemurs. I am particularly interested in understanding how cognitive and behavioural variation observed in experimental settings relates to the challenges animals face in their natural social and ecological environments.

A second major strand of my research focuses on the evolutionary and developmental origins of moral behaviour. I investigate behaviours such as cooperation, punishment, fairness, and responses to social norm violations, asking which components of human morality may have deeper evolutionary roots and how they emerge during childhood. This work combines comparative research with non-human primates, developmental studies with children, and cross-cultural research examining punishment and social decision-making across human societies.

I also study the evolutionary foundations of economic behaviour, including the origins of monetary systems and whether capacities underlying the use and categorisation of money can be traced to non-human primates, through studies of exchange behaviour in brown tufted capuchin monkeys.

Alongside this work, I co-lead Science Adventures, a community-embedded developmental research programme that brings families, schools, and researchers together. Science Adventures aims to create opportunities for children and families to engage directly with scientific research and develop an interest in science from an early age, while also making developmental research more accessible and increasing the diversity and representativeness of the families who take part in psychological research.


Teaching

I am the module leader for PSY3057: Decision Making and Cooperation: understanding our choices, and I contribute to PSY2020: Introduction to comparative cognition & behaviour.

I am the Strand Leader for the Psychology PARTNERS Summer School.

I supervise students for the BSc Psychology and MRes in Animal Behaviour and Human Evolution programmes. I am also open to supervising PhD students. If you'd like to discuss potential supervision, don't hesitate to contact me.


Publications