scholarly journals The cultural evolution of communicative conventions: Interactions between population connectivity dynamics and cognitive biases

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Segovia Martin ◽  
Monica Tamariz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Population Connectivity

scholarly journals How culture and biology interact to shape language and the language faculty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Repeated Cycle ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Precise Relationship

Recent work suggests that linguistic structure develops through cultural evolution, as a consequence of the repeated cycle of learning and use by which languages persist. This work has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of the cognitive basis for language: in particular, human language and the cognitive capacities underpinning it are likely to have been shaped by co-evolutionary processes, where the cultural evolution of linguistic systems is shaped by and in turn shapes the biological evolution of the capacities underpinning language learning. I review several models of this co-evolutionary process, which suggest that the precise relationship between evolved biases in individuals and the structure of linguistic systems depends on the extent to which cultural evolution masks or unmasks individual-level cognitive biases from selection. I finish by discussing how these co-evolutionary models might be extended to cases where the biases involved in learning are themselves shaped by experience, as is the case for language.

Cultural Attraction in Film Evolution: the Case of Anachronies

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 218-237
Author(s):  
Oleg Sobchuk ◽  
Peeter Tinits
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Functional Difference ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Historical Dynamics ◽  
Cognitive Preferences ◽  
Psychological Experiments

Abstract In many films, story is presented in an order different from chronological. Deviations from the chronological order in a narrative are called anachronies. Narratological theory and the evidence from psychological experiments indicate that anachronies allow stories to be more interesting, as the non-chronological order evokes curiosity in viewers. In this paper we investigate the historical dynamics in the use of anachronies in film. Particularly, we follow the cultural attraction theory that suggests that, given certain conditions, cultural evolution should conform to our cognitive preferences. We study this on a corpus of 80 most popular mystery films released in 1970–2009. We observe that anachronies have become used more frequently, and in a greater proportion of films. We also find that films that made substantial use of anachronies, on average, distributed the anachronies evenly along film length, while the films that made little use of anachronies placed them near the beginning and end. We argue that this can reflect a functional difference between these two types of using anachronies. The paper adds further support to the argument that popular culture may be influenced to a significant degree by our cognitive biases.

scholarly journals Cultural evolution leads to vocal iconicity in an experimental iterated learning task

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Niklas Erben Johansson ◽  
Jon W Carr ◽  
Simon Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Transmission Chain ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Iterated Learning

Abstract Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words that carry meanings related to size and shape. Although these studies demonstrate the importance of vocal iconicity and reveal the cognitive biases underpinning it, there is less work demonstrating how these biases lead to the evolution of a sound symbolic lexicon in the first place. In this study, we show how words can be shaped by cognitive biases through cultural evolution. Using a simple experimental setup resembling the game telephone, we examined how a single word form changed as it was passed from one participant to the next by a process of immediate iterated learning. About 1,500 naïve participants were recruited online and divided into five condition groups. The participants in the control-group received no information about the meaning of the word they were about to hear, while the participants in the remaining four groups were informed that the word meant either big or small (with the meaning being presented in text), or round or pointy (with the meaning being presented as a picture). The first participant in a transmission chain was presented with a phonetically diverse word and asked to repeat it. Thereafter, the recording of the repeated word was played for the next participant in the same chain. The sounds of the audio recordings were then transcribed and categorized according to six binary sound parameters. By modelling the proportion of vowels or consonants for each sound parameter, the small-condition showed increases of front unrounded vowels and the pointy-condition increases of acute consonants. The results show that linguistic transmission is sufficient for vocal iconicity to emerge, which demonstrates the role non-arbitrary associations play in the evolution of language.

Cultural Evolution

Anthropology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Genetic Evolution

“Cultural evolution” is the idea that human cultural change––that is, changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge, customs, skills, attitudes, languages, and so on––can be described as a Darwinian evolutionary process that is similar in key respects (but not identical) to biological/genetic evolution. More specifically, just as Darwin described biological/genetic evolution as comprising three key components––variation, competition (or selection), and inheritance––cultural change also comprises these same phenomena. Yet while cultural evolution can be described as Darwinian in this sense, the details of the processes (e.g., how variation is generated, or how information is transmitted) are likely to be different in the cultural case compared to the details of biological/genetic evolution. Bearing these differences in mind, cultural evolution researchers have taken many of the same methods, tools, and concepts that biologists have developed to explain biological diversity and complexity and used them to explain similar diversity and complexity in cultural systems. These include phylogenetic methods to reconstruct “macroevolutionary” historical relations between cultural traits (e.g., languages or tools), ethnographic field studies to document and explain contemporary cross-cultural variation, laboratory experiments to determine the small-scale details of cultural “microevolution” (e.g., how cognitive biases favor certain ideas over others or whether we preferentially learn from certain people within a group), and mathematical models to explore the long-term and population-level consequences of those microevolutionary processes. Given this interdisciplinary breadth, it has been suggested that evolutionary theory may serve as a synthetic framework for unifying the social sciences, just as evolutionary theory synthesized the biological sciences during the early 20th century.

scholarly journals Not By Art Alone: Error, Bias, and Chaos in Musical Evolution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Alan Lopez-Hanshaw
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Chaotic Behavior ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Selective Forces ◽  
Musical Evolution ◽  
Error Bias ◽  
Evolutionary Phonology

Musical change is an example of cultural evolution. This chapter, to be included in "Music in Human Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Musical Species" edited by Johnathan Friedmann, outlines the interplay between cultural values and cognitive biases within an evolutionary framework. This also includes an introduction to concepts specific to cultural evolution, such as guided variation and constrained mutation. Juliette Blevins' Evolutionary Phonology framework is extended to music, treating pitch systems as phonological systems, subject to similar cognitive biases that result in similar patterns of change. Cultural values surrounding music then act upon the output of lower-level "phonological" processes, both as selective forces and as influences on musicians' "guided variation." Because the resulting patterns show some hallmarks of chaotic behavior, the chapter concludes by advocating an agent-based modeling approach.

scholarly journals Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Population Size ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Small Populations ◽  
Cultural Complexity ◽  
Cultural Domain ◽  
Folk Narratives

We investigate the relation between cultural complexity and population size in a non-technological cultural domain for which we have suitable quantitative records: folktales. We define three levels of complexity for folk narratives: the number of tale types, the number of narrative motifs, and, finally, the number of traits in variants of the same type, for two well known tales for which we have data from previous studies. We found a positive relationship between number of tale types and population size, a negative relationship for the number of narrative motifs, and no relationship for the number of traits. The absence of a consistent relation between population size and complexity in folktales provides a novel perspective on the current debates in cultural evolution. We propose that the link between cultural complexity and demography could be domain dependent: in some domains (e.g. technology) this link is important, whereas in others, such as folktales, complex traditions can be easily maintained in small populations as well as large ones, as they may appeal to universal cognitive biases.

scholarly journals Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix

2008 ◽  
Vol 363 (1509) ◽  
pp. 3563-3575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wheeler ◽  
Andy Clark
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Triple Helix ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Apparent Contrast ◽  
Cognitive Modularity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Environment Of Evolutionary Adaptedness

Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant stress upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result. On the face of it, this suggests either a tension or, at least, a mismatch, with the symbiotic dyad of cultural evolution and embodied cognition. In what follows, we explore this mismatch by focusing on three key ideas: cognitive niche construction; cognitive modularity; and the existence (or otherwise) of an evolved universal human nature. An appreciation of the power and scope of the first, combined with consequently more nuanced visions of the latter two, allow us to begin to glimpse a much richer vision of the combined interactive potency of biological and cultural evolution for active, embodied agents.

Cognitive Evolution and the Transmission of Popular Narratives: A Literature Review and Application to Urban Legends

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Stubbersfield ◽  
Emma G. Flynn ◽  
Jamshid J. Tehrani
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Selective Pressures ◽  
Urban Legends ◽  
Types Of Information

Recent research into cultural transmission suggests that humans are disposed to learn, remember, and transmit certain types of information more easily than others, and that any information that is passed between people will be subjected to cognitive selective pressures that alter the content and structure so as to make it maximally transmittable. This paper presents a review of emerging research on content biases in cultural evolution with relevance to the transmission of popular narratives. This is illustrated with content analysis of urban legends, which found that most exploited at least one known content bias, with emotional information and social information being the most frequent. We argue that the narratives do not succeed because of the transmission of adaptively relevant information but because of their exploitation of content biases in human cognition.Keywords: urban legends, content biases, cognitive biases, cultural evolution, cultural transmission

Social transmission bias and the cultural evolution of folk-economic beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hirshleifer ◽  
Siew Hong Teoh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Transmission ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Economic Attitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Beliefs ◽  
Over Time

AbstractEvolved dispositions influence, but do not determine, how people think about economic problems. The evolutionary cognitive approach offers important insights but underweights the social transmission of ideas as a level of explanation. The need for asocialexplanation for the evolution of economic attitudes is evidenced, for example, by immense variations in folk-economic beliefs over time and across individuals.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document