Alberto Acerbi

Associate Professor

I am a researcher in the field of cultural evolution. My work is at the interface of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. I am interested in particular to contemporary cultural phenomena, and I use a naturalistic, quantitative, and evolutionary approach with different methodologies, especially individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale cultural data. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, and member of the C2S2 - Centre for Computational Social Science and Human Dynamics.

My last book (published in March 2025) is Tecnopanico (il Mulino, in Italian).

Earlier, I wrote a book for Oxford University Press: Cultural evolution in the digital age, and an open access manual: Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R (a physical version is available with Routeldge). I also curate a free substack newsletter (in Italian), with links to material about cultural evolution and digital technologies: Cinque link a settimana.

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News/Forthcoming events

16 June 2026: IAST (Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse) General seminar: "The cultural ecology of social media".

4 June 2026: Talk at the seminar series Pensare nell'era del dato at the Istituto per la Storia del Pensiero Filosofico e Scientifico Moderno, Napoli: "Disinformazione ed influenza sociale online".

25 May 2026: Technopanic release day!

23 April 2026: Talk at Public Tech Media Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison: "The cultural ecology of social media". Zoom link.

9 April 2026: Talk at the Scientific Progress via Model Transfer? The Case of Cultural Evolution workshop in Hannover: "The cultural ecology of social media". Slides here.

People

John-Paul Martindale, postdoc in the Leverhulme Trust funded project "Weaponised Pasts", 2025 - current (co-supervised with Chiara Bonacchi and Zachary Horne).

Former postdocs:

Kyle Fischer, postdoc in the John Templeton Foundation funded project "Changing the perspective on social media interventions: improving engagement with true news", 2023 - 2025.

Research

Cultural evolution and cultural attraction

Much of my work is inspired by the cultural attraction theory framework, developed within the so-called Paris School of cultural evolution. This approach views culture not mostly as something copied and transmitted, but as something continually reconstructed through individual cognition and interaction. When ideas, behaviours, or artefacts are transmitted, they are not reproduced perfectly — they are transformed in systematic ways by our psychological biases, inferential processes, and communicative contexts.

Oct 6, 2025

Research

Digital media and cultural evolution

Since 2015, I have been interested in applying a cultural evolution framework to the study of digital media and digital technology more broadly. In this early paper I outlined some possible areas of investigation, and in this one I explored online misinformation from a cognitive anthropology perspective. I have also studied if and how digital media can boost cumulative cultural evolution, using online fan fiction as a case study, or how content biases may operate differently when the same material is transmitted orally (as in a “telephone game”) versus shared online.

Oct 6, 2025

Research

Individual-based models of cultural evolution

I started my academic career as a modeller (in fact, as an artificial life/robotics researcher: this is my first publication ever), and I continue to believe that computational models are a fundamental tool for advancing research in cultural evolution. On the one hand, models are excellent theory-generating machines: they allow to formalise thought experiments and explore their consequences, which is often impossible by intuition alone. On the other hand, models make theories explicit and directly testable by other researchers.

Oct 6, 2025

Research

Quantitative analysis of large scale cultural data

I am interested in analysing large, naturally occurring datasets to investigate human cultural dynamics, especially in modern societies. By “naturally occurring,” I mean datasets that were not created specifically for research purposes (like surveys or census data) but instead represent traces, often digital, of human activity, such as books, songs, movies, or social media interactions.

Oct 6, 2025

Books

Book

Tecnopanico

--- Videos: A report from RAI Trentino. Il cantiere delle idee, a RAI production. Book presentation at Acta Diurna: An interview for War Room/linkiesta:

Mar 7, 2025

Book

Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R

Jul 5, 2022

Book

Cultural evolution in the digital age

Academic reviews: Joshua Conrad Jackson, New Technology, Same Culture, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 2020: With "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age", Acerbi joins the likes of Peter Turchin, David Sloan Wilson, and Joseph Henrich in offering an engaging and accessible application of cultural evolutionary models, which will almost certainly attract new scholars to the field. Never did I expect to read about Grumpy Cat and the social brain hypothesis in the same book, but the result was genuinely satisfying.

Nov 29, 2019

Recent Publications

William Costello, Alberto Acerbi (2026). Why Incels Capture Attention. A Cultural Attraction Theory Perspective. In Evolutionary Psychological Science, 12, 1.

PDF Cite Link

Alberto Acerbi (2025). Tecnopanico. Il Mulino.

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Alberto Acerbi, Benôit De Courson (2025). Weak individual preferences stabilize culture. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 122 (8), e2412380122.

PDF Cite Code Link

Chiara Bonacchi, Marta Krzyzanska, Alberto Acerbi (2025). Positive sentiment and expertise predict the diffusion of archaeological content on social media. In Scientific Reports, 15, 2031.

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Sacha Altay, Alberto Acerbi (2024). People believe misinformation is a threat because they assume others are gullible. In New Media & Society, 26, 11.

PDF Cite Dataset Link Preregistration

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Teaching

Current issues in digital media and politics: MSc-level (laurea magistrale Data Science) module, first term (co-taught with Prof. Elena Pavan).

Cultural analytics: MSc-level (laurea magistrale Sociology and Social Research) module, second term.

Costruire un disegno di analisi dei fenomeni sociali: BSc-level (laurea triennale Sociologia) module, second term.