Research
My research focuses on how and why individuals choose particular mates. I am especially interested in how parents and offspring navigate spouse choice decisions in cultures with arranged marriage, and how arranged marriages and love marriages differ in reproduction, health, and wellbeing. I use qualitative and quantitative data and borrow methods from a variety of disciplines in my research, including cross-cultural ethnographic comparison, analysis of large demographic surveys, cross-species comparison, focus group discussions, experiments from psychology, and primary fieldwork. I collect data on spouse choice, life-history, fertility, and child health in Dhading District, Nepal.
Publications:
Agey, E., Conroy-Beam, D., & Gaulin, S.J.C. (2024). Offspring and parent preferences for a spouse or in-law in an arranged marriage context. *Evolution and Human Behavior,*45(5): 106612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.106612
Agey, E. (2024). Arranged and non-arranged marriages have similar reproductive outcomes in Nepal. Nature Scientific Reports, 14: 11080. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-61467-8
Agey, E., Crippen, S., Wells, A. & Upreti, P. (2023). Socioeconomic benefits and limited parent-offspring disagreement in arranged marriages in Nepal. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 5, E7. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.3
Agey, E., Morris, A., Chandy, M., & Gaulin, S.J.C. (2021). Arranged Marriage Often Subverts Offspring Mate Preferences: An HRAF-Based Study. American Anthropologist, 123: 861-878. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13656
Sznycer, D., Xygalatas, D., Agey, E., Alami, S., …, & Tooby, J. (2018). Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 115: 9702-9707. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805016115