Review
Biology
Alex Mesoudi
Summary: This article discusses two broad versions of human cultural evolution in the literature, one emphasizing cultural selection and the other biased transformation of cultural variants, pointing out that they are not mutually exclusive. Identifying cultural dynamics in real-world cultural data is challenging, but fine-grained historical analysis, experiments, and formal models offer the best way to distinguish them.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Biology
Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew, Victoire D'Amico
Summary: Through experiments on 489 participants, it was found that individuals were more motivated to learn and imitate successful behaviors, rather than common behaviors. The results indicated that social learning discouraged costly cooperation, even when individuals could observe a stable, pro-social level of cooperation.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Brendan J. Barrett
Summary: Two-option choice experimental designs are commonly used to study social learning in captive and wild animal populations. However, in nature, animals often have more than two behavioral options, and multiple innovations can occur simultaneously. This study shows that increasing the number of behavioral options an animal can choose from improves the accuracy and certainty of identifying social learning strategies, particularly in studies with small sample sizes. These findings highlight the importance of considering the behaviors that animals did not choose when studying social learning strategies.
JOURNAL OF ANIMAL ECOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Charlotte Canteloup, Mabia B. Cera, Brendan J. Barrett, Erica van de Waal
Summary: The study found that social learning is crucial for the formation of behavioral traditions, with individuals preferring to learn techniques that yield the highest payoff and showing bias towards individuals of higher rank during the learning process. The integration of social information about efficiency of behavior and cues related to demonstrator rank can lead to stable behavioral traditions within a group.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen, William Hoppitt
Summary: This study investigates the cultural transmission of grooming handclasp in chimpanzees and finds that it is influenced by older and dominant individuals. The findings suggest that chimpanzees' social lives are influenced by cultural transmission biases, previously thought to be unique to humans.
Article
Anthropology
L. S. Premo
Summary: The study investigates how population size affects the coefficient of variation (CV) of a continuous cultural trait under different cultural transmission mechanisms. Results show that the CV of a continuous cultural trait is determined by its cultural equivalent N and effective population size (Ne) as well as the strength of cultural selection. Different combinations of N and cultural transmission can yield identical CV values.
JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD AND THEORY
(2021)
Article
Biology
Fredrik Jansson, Elliot Aguilar, Alberto Acerbi, Magnus Enquist
Summary: The field of cultural evolution aims to understand how individual-level processes of transmission and selection lead to population-wide patterns of cultural diversity and change; cultural traits bear relationships to one another that affect the transmission and selection process; introducing structure changes cultural dynamics.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Biology
Adrian Varallyay, Nathalia Beller, Francys Subiaul
Summary: This study investigates whether the unique compositional nature of human cultures contributes to their distinct cumulative nature. Through a learning experiment, the researchers found that both children and adults were able to observe and replicate learned behaviors, and apply them to new situations. However, only adults in the imitation condition were able to combine newly learned elements. These findings suggest that early in development, humans possess cognitive skills that transform social learning competencies into cultural learning, enabling the evolution of complex human cultures.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2023)
Review
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Heather Williams
Summary: Young songbirds learn their songs from parents, peers, and unrelated adults, as well as through innovation. These learned songs are used for intraspecific communication and have specific functions such as territory maintenance and mate attraction. The mechanisms responsible for cultural evolution of bird songs within a population include drift, learning biases, and selection, contributing to the variability and stability of song segments within populations over time.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biology
Thomas J. H. Morgan, Jordan W. Suchow, Thomas L. Griffiths
Summary: This study examines the ability of human social learning to respond to environmental changes and finds that human social learning shows some signs of adaptation to environmental instability, but these adaptations are insufficient to avoid significant declines in fitness. Additionally, the study finds that many individuals are highly conformist, exacerbating the fitness effects of environmental change.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Anne Sibilsky, Heidi Colleran, Dominik Deffner, Daniel B. M. Haun
Summary: Observational learning plays a key role in cultural transmission, as shown in previous transmission chain experiments. This study examines children's copying fidelity in observational learning across different communities, finding that functional features are transmitted more faithfully than non-functional features, and the accuracy of transmission increases with age. Furthermore, being observed has varying effects on transmission across communities. Overall, the study shows that children have a high propensity and developing abilities for observational learning, allowing for effective cultural transmission.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Dorde Markovic, Na'ama Aljadeff, Lucy M. Aplin, Arnon Lotem
Summary: The extent to which animal societies exhibit social conformity or behavioral diversity is commonly attributed to adaptive learning strategies. However, the relative difficulty of learning a task socially versus individually can also play a critical role in social learning dynamics. A study with house sparrows showed that raising the initial task difficulty caused the sparrows to predominantly conform rather than exhibit adaptive diversity. The results suggest that a task's cognitive demands, such as the initial reliance on social demonstration, can change the learning dynamics and lead social animals to exhibit sub-optimal social conformity rather than adaptive diversity.
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Biology
Ellen C. Garland, Claire Garrigue, Michael J. Noad
Summary: Culture acts as a second form of inheritance system for transmitting innovations between generations. The constantly evolving songs of humpback whales show some characteristics of cumulative cultural evolution, but further research is needed to determine if it fully meets the criteria.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Mathematics, Interdisciplinary Applications
Ligia Cremene, Marcel Cremene
Summary: The study explores the impact of various social learning mechanisms on the dynamics of honest behavior in a virtual population engaged in a probabilistic-payoff social dilemma game. It found that conformity and identity have significant effects on the contagion of honest behavior, but their impact is dependent on the network topology and exhibits nonlinear behavior with phase shifts.
CHAOS SOLITONS & FRACTALS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Anne Sibilsky, Heidi Colleran, Richard McElreath, Daniel B. M. Haun
Summary: By studying the social learning patterns of children in Vanuatu, it was found that children in this country have a higher rate of social learning. The results also showed the presence of modest U-shaped age patterns in multiple societies, suggesting that the developmental mechanisms of majority bias are cross-culturally recurrent and fundamental in early human social learning.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Correction
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Alex Mesoudi
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
C. O. Brand, A. Mesoudi
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
(2019)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Angel Jimenez, Alex Mesoudi, Jamshid J. Tehrani
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Maxime Derex, Alex Mesoudi
TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES
(2020)
Review
Biology
Alex Mesoudi
Summary: This article discusses two broad versions of human cultural evolution in the literature, one emphasizing cultural selection and the other biased transformation of cultural variants, pointing out that they are not mutually exclusive. Identifying cultural dynamics in real-world cultural data is challenging, but fine-grained historical analysis, experiments, and formal models offer the best way to distinguish them.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Charlotte O. Brand, Alex Mesoudi, Thomas J. H. Morgan
Summary: Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals prefer to learn from prestigious group members. While previous research has confirmed the adaptive use of prestige-bias, the domain-specificity and generality of this bias has not been explicitly addressed experimentally.Results from an online experiment suggest that individuals overwhelmingly prefer domain-specific prestige cues, but also show a preference for domain-general cues when only cross-domain cues are available. This indicates that people may vary in the extent to which they employ domain-specific or domain-general prestige-bias depending on their experience and understanding of different domains.
Editorial Material
Biology
Alex Thornton, Alex Mesoudi
PHYSICS OF LIFE REVIEWS
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Angel V. Jimenez, Alex Mesoudi
Summary: This study investigates how informal social hierarchies within small human groups are based on prestige, dominance, or a combination of both. The authors hypothesized that prestige and dominance cues are better recalled and transmitted than social rank cues. While their findings supported the better transmission of both prestige and dominance cues over medium social rank cues, they did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that dominance cues are better transmitted than prestige cues. The results raise questions about specific social-rank content transmission biases and general emotional content transmission biases.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2021)
Correction
Anthropology
Angel V. Jimenez, Adam Flitton, Alex Mesoudi
EVOLUTIONARY HUMAN SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Anthropology
Angel V. Jimenez, Adam Flitton, Alex Mesoudi
Summary: This paper explores and critiques the application of dominance and prestige framework to politics. It argues that this framework does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies, and shows that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference for both dominant and prestigious leaders. The study also highlights that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are influenced by the perceiver's political ideology.
EVOLUTIONARY HUMAN SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Philosophy
Alex Mesoudi
Summary: Cultural variation is directed in various ways and should not be simply viewed as blind and random. Different sources of non-randomness in culturally evolving systems should be given more attention.
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
(2021)
Review
Anthropology
Stefan Gehrig, Alex Mesoudi, Shakti Lamba
EVOLUTIONARY HUMAN SCIENCES
(2020)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Angel Jimenez, Alex Mesoudi
JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND CULTURE
(2020)
Article
Anthropology
Arie Altman, Alex Mesoudi
Article
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Angel V. Jimenez, Alex Mesoudi
PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS
(2019)