“Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age” theme session at the CESC 2017

I am organising a one-hour theme session at the inaugural conference of the Cultural Evolution Society that will take place in Jena in September. The outline programme of the conference has been just published on their website. The session – “Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age” – is scheduled for the first day, Wednesday the 13th, in the morning. Plenty of other interesting talks and events all throughout the conference (but of course I am quite biased…). Below the excellent abstracts of the three talks that will constitute the session. See you in Jena!

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Journal of Cultural Evolution, again

Exactly four years ago, writing on this very blog, I was starting to mumble about the possibility of a journal dedicated to the field of Cultural Evolution. The post prompted a number of supportive reactions and some actual actions – for example, a meeting at the EHBEA Conference 2014 in Bristol –  but without any concrete result (my summary of the situation at the end of 2015 is here).

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Emotions in 50 years of pop songs lyrics

I found, thanks to twitter-induced serendipity (others call it procrastination), the lyrics of the songs included in the annual Billboard Top-100 from 1965 to 2015 (i.e., considering a few missing, ~5,000 songs). You can find in GitHub, together with the raw data, some clarifications on how the data were collected, their limitations, etc. plus a pointer to a nice analysis already done.

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Complexity of folktales and cultural attraction

The complexity of some cultural domains, such as technology, seems to be linked to population size. This makes intuitive sense: after all, we have iPhones and rockets, whereas hunter-gatherer societies do not. How does this work, however, for other, non-technological, cultural domains? Western stories are not more complex than Aboriginal Australians ones (I guess). What about religions, or kinship systems?

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Three predictions for cultural attraction theory

The next EHBEA conference in Paris will include a “satellite meeting” on cultural attraction theory: Cultural Evolution by Cultural Attraction: Empirical Issues

I will give a talk titled Three predictions for cultural attraction theory. Below the (tentative) slides. If you cannot wait, the three predictions are:

  1. lo-fi copying is more significant than hi-fi copying in cultural transmission
  2. domain-general social influence (context-biases) is not very important
  3. culture is a matter of global, often neutral, traditions, more than local, generally adaptive, differences

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