I am a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist with a particular interest in computational science, and this is my blog and professional website. The main question that drives my research is: is it possible to find some general factors determining why some cultural traits succeed and others do not? In the cultural arena things climb towards success in a haphazard manner, but some overall regularities may be discovered. To answer this question I use a naturalistic, quantitative, approach (yes, I think anthropology should be a science) with different methodologies, especially individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale data.
Interests
- Cultural Evolution
- Cognitive Anthropology
- Computational Social Science
Latest
- Vaccine hesitancy is not correlated with social media penetration at country-level in Europe
- The ordeal simulation hypothesis
- Why people die in novels: Testing the ordeal simulation hypothesis
- Is cultural evolution “neoliberal”?
- Cultural stability without copying
- Morgue employee cremated by mistake while taking a nap
- Cognitive attraction and online misinformation
- The impact of the “World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates” list on scientific publications and media
- Copy-the-majority of instances or individuals? Two approaches to the majority and their consequences for conformist decision-making
- Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics
- imsdb movie scripts (dataset)
- Did Einstein really say that? Testing content versus context in the cultural selection of quotations
- Reply to ‘Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission’
- Folk-economic beliefs as “evidential fiction”: Putting the economic public discourse back on track
- Role of Neutral evolution in word turnover during centuries of English word popularity
- Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales
- Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction
- Review of Tim Lewens, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges
- A cultural evolution approach to digital media
- A reappreciation of “conformity”
- Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures
- Social learning solves the problem of narrow-peaked search landscapes: experimental evidence in humans
- The role of redundant information in cultural transmission and cultural stabilization
- Emergence of Leadership in a Group of Autonomous Robots
- If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution
- Dog Movies Stars and Dog Breed Popularity: A Case Study in Media Influence on Choice
- Biases in cultural transmission shape the turnover of popular traits
- Books average previous decade of economic misery
- Regulatory traits: Cultural Influences on Cultural Evolution
- Robustness of emotion extraction from 20th century English books
- Fashion vs. Function in Cultural Evolution: The Case of Dog Breed Popularity
- The expression of emotions in 20th century books
- Old and Young Individuals’ Role in Cultural Change
- Emergence of Leadership in a Group of Autonomous Robots
- Behavioral constraints and the evolution of faithful social learning
- The Logic of Fashion Cycles
- Regulatory Traits in Cultural Evolution
- Modeling imitation and emulation in constrained search spaces
- Predation and the phasing of sleep: an evolutionary individual-based model
- The Sometimes Evitable Route to Conservatism and Persuasiveness. A Reply to Xue and Costopoulos
- Umano troppo umano. Riflessioni sull’opposizione natura/cultura in antropologia
- Cultural evolution and individual development of openness and conservatism
- Orienting learning by exploiting sociality: an evolutionary robotics simulations
- Modelli evoluzionistici della cultura
- Naturalmente differenti. Spiegazioni naturalistiche e variabilità culturale
- Trasmissione sociale di comportamenti in una popolazione di robot autonomi
- Social learning in embodied agents
- To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms
- Le trasmissioni della cultura
- La natura della cultura. Modelli simulativi dell'apprendimento sociale
- Social Facilitation on the Development of Foraging Behaviors in a Population of Autonomous Robots
- The evolution of pain
- Social Learning and Cultural Evolution in Embodied and Situated Agents
- Adaptation and Social Facilitation in a Population of Autonomous Robots
- Cultural transmission between and within generations
- Antropologia cognitiva e modularità della mente: il caso della folkbiology
- Trasmissibilità culturale di tratti discreti e continui
- Antropologia cognitiva: uno stato dell'arte
- Esiste una folkanthropology? E, se esiste, a chi interessa?
- La mente nella cultura: cognizione ed analisi dei fatti culturali