Outcomes in the cultural arena are due to many factors but are there general rules that can suggest what makes some cultural traits successful and others not? Research in cultural evolution theory distinguishes factors related to social influence …
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of ‘machine culture’, culture mediated or generated by machines. We …
As the use of large language models (LLMs) grows, it is important to examine whether they exhibit biases in their output. Research in cultural evolution, using transmission chain experiments, demonstrates that humans have biases to attend to, …
During the 2020 US presidential election, conspiracy theories about large-scale voter fraud were widely circulated on social media platforms. Given their scale, persistence, and impact, it is critically important to understand the mechanisms that …
In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith’s two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith’s …
The diffusion of digital technologies triggered a radical departure from previous modalities of cultural transmission but, at the same time, general characteristics of human cultural evolution and cognition influence these developments. This chapter …
The method of exclusion identifies patterns of distributions of behaviours and/or artefact forms among different groups, where these patterns are deemed unlikely to arise from purely genetic and/or ecological factors. The presence of such patterns is …
Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, …
Individual-Based Models of Cultural Evolution shows readers how to create individual-based models of cultural evolution using the programming language R. The field of cultural evolution has emerged in the last few decades as a thriving, …
Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, where individuals need to …