scholarly journals Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Processes

AbstractHow do migration and acculturation (i.e. psychological or behavioral change resulting from migration) affect within- and between-group cultural variation? Here I answer this question by drawing analogies between genetic and cultural evolution. Population genetic models show that migration rapidly breaks down between-group genetic structure. In cultural evolution, however, migrants or their descendants can acculturate to local behaviors via social learning processes such as conformity, potentially preventing migration from eliminating between-group cultural variation. An analysis of the empirical literature on migration suggests that acculturation is common, with second and subsequent migrant generations shifting, sometimes substantially, towards the cultural values of the adopted society. Yet there is little understanding of the individual-level dynamics that underlie these population-level shifts. To explore this formally, I present models quantifying the effect of migration and acculturation on between-group cultural variation, for both neutral and costly cooperative traits. In the models, between-group cultural variation, measured using F statistics, is eliminated by migration and maintained by conformist acculturation. The extent of acculturation is determined by the strength of conformist bias and the number of demonstrators from whom individuals learn. Acculturation is countered by assortation, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with culturally-similar others. Unlike neutral traits, cooperative traits can additionally be maintained by payoff-biased social learning, but only in the presence of strong sanctioning institutions. Overall, the models show that surprisingly little conformist acculturation is required to maintain realistic amounts of between-group cultural diversity. While these models provide insight into the potential dynamics of acculturation and migration in cultural evolution, they also highlight the need for more empirical research into the individual-level learning biases that underlie migrant acculturation.

Cultural evolution in more than two dimensions: Distinguishing social learning biases and identifying payoff structures

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-92
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Learning Biases ◽  
Payoff Structure ◽  
Social Learning Biases

AbstractBentley et al.’s two-dimensional conceptual map is complementary to cultural evolution research that has sought to explain population-level cultural dynamics in terms of individual-level behavioral processes. Here, I qualify their scheme by arguing that different social learning biases should be treated distinctly, and that the transparency of decisions is sometimes conflated with the actual underlying payoff structure of those decisions.

scholarly journals Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 170949 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Kandler ◽  
Bryan Wilder ◽  
Laura Fortunato
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The One ◽  
Over Time

Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interface between population-level patterns and individual-level processes. The model tracks the distribution of variants of cultural traits across individuals in a population over time, conditioned on different pathways for the transmission of information between individuals. From these data, we obtain theoretical expectations for a range of statistics commonly used to capture population-level characteristics (e.g. the degree of cultural diversity). Consistent with previous theoretical work, our results show that the patterns observed at the level of groups are rooted in the interplay between the transmission pathways and the age structure of the population. We also explore whether, and under what conditions, the different pathways can be distinguished based on their group-level signatures, in an effort to establish theoretical limits to inference. Our results show that the temporal dynamic of cultural change over time retains a stronger signature than the cultural composition of the population at a specific point in time. Overall, the results suggest a shift in focus from identifying the one individual-level process that likely produced the observed data to excluding those that likely did not. We conclude by discussing the implications for empirical studies of human cultural evolution.

scholarly journals Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Olivia Brand ◽  
Alberto Acerbi ◽  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Statistical Modelling ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Learning Biases ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Expression Of Emotions ◽  
And Migration ◽  
User Friendly

The cultural dynamics of music has recently become a popular avenue of research in the field of cultural evolution, reflecting a growing interest in art and popular culture more generally. Just as biologists seek to explain population-level trends in genetic evolution in terms of micro-evolutionary processes such as selection, drift and migration, cultural evolutionists have sought to explain population-level cultural phenomena in terms of underlying social, psychological and demographic factors. Primary amongst these factors are learning biases, describing how cultural items are socially transmitted from person to person. As big datasets become more openly available and workable, and statistical modelling techniques become more powerful, efficient and user-friendly, describing population-level dynamics in terms of simple, individual-level learning biases is becoming more feasible. Here we test for the presence of learning biases in two large datasets of popular song lyrics dating from 1965-2015. We find some evidence of content bias, prestige bias and success bias in the proliferation of negative lyrics, and suggest that negative expression of emotions in music, and perhaps art generally, provides an avenue for people to not only process and express their own negative emotions, but also benefit from the knowledge that prestigious others experience similarly negative emotions as they do.

On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Boyd ◽  
Joseph Henrich
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Cognition And Culture ◽  
The Individual

AbstractFormal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of 'representations.' Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are 'reconstructed' through an inferential process that is strongly affected by cognitive 'attractors.' They argue that it follows from these three claims that: 1) models that assume replication or replicators are inappropriate, 2) selective cultural learning cannot account for stable traditions, and 3) selective cultural learning cannot generate cumulative adaptation. Here we use three formal models to show that even if the premises of this critique are correct, the deductions that have been drawn from them are false. In the first model, we assume continuously varying representations under the influence of weak selective transmission and strong attractors. We show that if the attractors are sufficiently strong relative to selective forces, the continuous representation model reduces to the standard discrete-trait replicator model, and the weak selective component determines the final equilibrium of the system. In the second model, we assume inaccurate replication and discrete traits. We show that very low fidelity replication of representations at the individual level does not preclude accurate replication at the population level, and therefore, accurate individual-level replication of representations is not necessary for either cultural inertia or cumulative cultural adaptation. In the third model, we derive plausible conditions for cumulative adaptive evolution, assuming continuous cultural representations, incomplete transmission and substantial inferential transformations.

scholarly journals Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Kandler ◽  
Bryan Wilder ◽  
Laura Fortunato
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The One ◽  
Over Time

AbstractOur species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interface between population-level patterns and individual-level processes. The model tracks the distribution of variants of cultural traits across individuals in a population over time, conditioned on different pathways for the transmission of information between individuals. From these data we obtain theoretical expectations for a range of statistics commonly used to capture population-level characteristics (e.g. the degree of cultural diversity). Consistent with previous theoretical work, our results show that the patterns observed at the level of groups are rooted in the interplay between the transmission pathways and the age structure of the population. We also explore whether, and under what conditions, the different pathways can be distinguished based on their group-level signatures, in an effort to establish theoretical limits to inference. Our results show that the temporal dynamic of cultural change over time retains a stronger signature than the cultural composition of the population at a specific point in time. Overall, the results suggest a shift in focus from identifying the one individual-level process that likely produced the observed data to excluding those that likely did not. We conclude by discussing the implications for empirical studies of human cultural evolution.

scholarly journals On “Nationology”: The Gravitational Field of National Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 002202212110447
Author(s):  
Plamen Akaliyski ◽  
Christian Welzel ◽  
Michael Harris Bond ◽  
Michael Minkov
Keyword(s):  
Gravitational Field ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Individual Values ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Individual

Nations have been questioned as meaningful units for analyzing culture due to their allegedly limited variance-capturing power and large internal heterogeneity. Against this skepticism, we argue that culture is by definition a collective phenomenon and focusing on individual differences contradicts the very concept of culture. Through the “miracle of aggregation,” we can eliminate random noise and arbitrary variation at the individual level in order to distill the central cultural tendencies of nations. Accordingly, we depict national culture as a gravitational field that socializes individuals into the orbit of a nation’s central cultural tendency. Even though individuals are also exposed to other gravitational forces, subcultures in turn gravitate within the limited orbit of their national culture. Using data from the World Values Survey, we show that individual values cluster in concentric circles around their nation’s cultural gravity center. We reveal the miracle of aggregation by demonstrating that nations capture the bulk of the variation in the individuals’ cultural values once they are aggregated into lower-level territorial units such as towns and sub-national regions. We visualize the gravitational force of national cultures by plotting various intra-national groups from five large countries that form distinct national clusters. Contrary to many scholars’ intuitions, alternative social aggregates, such as ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, as well as diverse socio-demographic categories, add negligible explained variance to that already captured by nations.

scholarly journals General intelligence disentangled via a generality metric for natural and artificial intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Hernández-Orallo ◽  
Bao Sheng Loe ◽  
Lucy Cheke ◽  
Fernando Martínez-Plumed ◽  
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh
Keyword(s):  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
General Intelligence ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Cognitive Efficiency ◽  
Comprehensive Performance ◽  
Individual Measure ◽  
Level Of Difficulty ◽  
The Individual

AbstractSuccess in all sorts of situations is the most classical interpretation of general intelligence. Under limited resources, however, the capability of an agent must necessarily be limited too, and generality needs to be understood as comprehensive performance up to a level of difficulty. The degree of generality then refers to the way an agent’s capability is distributed as a function of task difficulty. This dissects the notion of general intelligence into two non-populational measures, generality and capability, which we apply to individuals and groups of humans, other animals and AI systems, on several cognitive and perceptual tests. Our results indicate that generality and capability can decouple at the individual level: very specialised agents can show high capability and vice versa. The metrics also decouple at the population level, and we rarely see diminishing returns in generality for those groups of high capability. We relate the individual measure of generality to traditional notions of general intelligence and cognitive efficiency in humans, collectives, non-human animals and machines. The choice of the difficulty function now plays a prominent role in this new conception of generality, which brings a quantitative tool for shedding light on long-standing questions about the evolution of general intelligence and the evaluation of progress in Artificial General Intelligence.

scholarly journals Ecology and Prediction of Compensatory Growth: From Theory to Application in Forestry

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Li ◽  
Hugh Barclay ◽  
Bernard Roitberg ◽  
Robert Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Compensatory Growth ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Partial Mortality ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Dependent Model ◽  
Accelerated Growth ◽  
The Individual

Compensatory growth has been observed in forests, and it also appears as a common phenomenon in biology. Though it sometimes takes different names, the essential meanings are the same, describing the accelerated growth of organisms when recovering from a period of unfavorable conditions such as tissue damage at the individual level and partial mortality at the population level. Diverse patterns of compensatory growth have been reported in the literature, ranging from under-, to compensation-induced-equality, and to over-compensation. In this review and synthesis, we provide examples of analogous compensatory growth from different fields, clarify different meanings of it, summarize its current understanding and modeling efforts, and argue that it is possible to develop a state-dependent model under the conceptual framework of compensatory growth, aimed at explaining and predicting diverse observations according to different disturbances and environmental conditions. When properly applied, compensatory growth can benefit different industries and human society in various forms.

scholarly journals Modelling cultural systems and selective filters

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Jansson ◽  
Elliot Aguilar ◽  
Alberto Acerbi ◽  
Magnus Enquist
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Change Models ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
Structure Changes ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Cultural Domain ◽  
The Individual

A specific goal of the field of cultural evolution is to understand how processes of transmission and selection at the individual level lead to population-wide patterns of cultural diversity and change. Models of cultural evolution have typically assumed that traits are independent of one another and essentially exchangeable. But culture has a structure: traits bear relationships to one another that affect the transmission and selection process itself. Here we introduce a modelling framework to explore the effect of cultural structure on the process of learning. Through simulations, we find that introducing this simple structure changes the cultural dynamics. Based on a basic filtering mechanism for parsing these relationships, more elaborate cultural filters emerge. In a mostly incompatible cultural domain of traits, these filters organise culture into mostly (but not fully) consistent and stable systems. Incompatible domains produce small homogeneous cultures, while more compatibility increases size, diversity, and group divergence. When individuals copy based on a trait's features (here, its compatibility relationships) they produce more homogeneous cultures than when they copy based on the agent carrying the cultural trait. We discuss the implications of considering cultural systems and filters in the dynamics of cultural change.

scholarly journals Opposite outcomes of coinfection at individual and population scales

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (29) ◽  
pp. 7545-7550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin E. Gorsich ◽  
Rampal S. Etienne ◽  
Jan Medlock ◽  
Brianna R. Beechler ◽  
Johannie M. Spaan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reproduction Number ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
African Buffalo ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Secondary Infections ◽  
The Individual

Coinfecting parasites and pathogens remain a leading challenge for global public health due to their consequences for individual-level infection risk and disease progression. However, a clear understanding of the population-level consequences of coinfection is lacking. Here, we constructed a model that includes three individual-level effects of coinfection: mortality, fecundity, and transmission. We used the model to investigate how these individual-level consequences of coinfection scale up to produce population-level infection patterns. To parameterize this model, we conducted a 4-y cohort study in African buffalo to estimate the individual-level effects of coinfection with two bacterial pathogens, bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and brucellosis, across a range of demographic and environmental contexts. At the individual level, our empirical results identified bTB as a risk factor for acquiring brucellosis, but we found no association between brucellosis and the risk of acquiring bTB. Both infections were associated with reductions in survival and neither infection was associated with reductions in fecundity. The model reproduced coinfection patterns in the data and predicted opposite impacts of coinfection at individual and population scales: Whereas bTB facilitated brucellosis infection at the individual level, our model predicted the presence of brucellosis to have a strong negative impact on bTB at the population level. In modeled populations where brucellosis was present, the endemic prevalence and basic reproduction number (R0) of bTB were lower than in populations without brucellosis. Therefore, these results provide a data-driven example of competition between coinfecting pathogens that occurs when one pathogen facilitates secondary infections at the individual level.

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