Rate My Professor Anni Kajanus

Anni Kajanus is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, where she serves as a supervisor in the Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences. A social and cognitive anthropologist, she works at the interfaces between culture and cognition, morality and cooperation, with a regional focus on China. Her research covers migration, the one-child policy, gender, education, and child development. She employs combined ethnographic and experimental methods in comparative studies across cultural contexts including China, the UK, US, Finland, Colombia, and Zimbabwe. Kajanus leads the ERC Starting Grant-funded project IRRITATION: Irritation and Human Sociality (2022–2027) and the Academy of Finland project Ärtymys ja ihmisen yhteistyö (2022–2026), investigating the emotion of irritation in human cooperation, competitive motivations, conflict resolution, fairness norms, helping behaviors, and dominance-prestige hierarchies.

Kajanus holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Helsinki, an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Kent. Prior to her current role, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics Department of Anthropology and a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University Department of Psychology. She is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (2024–2027). Kajanus authored the book Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family. Her publications include 'Prestige and dominance in egalitarian and hierarchical societies: children in Finland favor prestige more than children in Colombia or the USA' (Evolution and Human Behavior, 2024), 'Children's understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK' (2020), 'Mutualistic vs. zero-sum modes of competition: a comparative study of children's competitive motivations and behaviours in China' (2019), 'Learning not to help in Nanjing and London – Cultural elaboration of empathy in childhood' (Ethos, 2026), 'Mainstream psychological and behavioural science meets anthropology: a study of behavioural transformation' (Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 2025), and 'Ethnographic authority and cross-disciplinary collaboration' (Current Anthropology, 2024).