Article
Physics, Multidisciplinary
Qiankun Zhong, Seth Frey, Martin Hilbert
Summary: Institutions and cultures evolve in response to environmental incentives, but sometimes institutional change is driven by stochastic factors beyond current fitness. This study examines the drivers of organizational change in Minecraft communities and finds strong selection pressure on administrative and information rules, while stochastic drivers decrease the frequency of administrative rules. It also shows that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of rules related to information, communication, and economic behaviors.
Review
Physics, Multidisciplinary
Ethan Levien, Jiseon Min, Jane Kondev, Ariel Amir
Summary: Phenotypic variability in isogenic populations has significant effects on population dynamics and the relationship between cell-to-cell variability and population dynamics is closely linked. Models of bet-hedging and phenotypic switching can help populations survive in uncertain environments through switching between phenotypes at the single-cell level. Fine-grained models of phenotypic variability show that even in a constant environment, traits like single-cell growth rates, generation times, and cell sizes can have significant effects on population dynamics.
REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Shinobu Kitayama, Cristina E. Salvador, Kevin Nanakdewa, Amelie Rossmaier, Alvaro San Martin, Krishna Savani
Summary: Cultural psychology has made significant progress in studying the cultural variations in how people think, feel, and act. The research suggests that Westerners are more independent, while people in other parts of the world are more interdependent. Recent studies have extended this research to non-Western regions and identified four distinct forms of interdependence in different cultural zones.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
(2022)
Review
Biology
Manvir Singh, Alberto Acerbi, Christine A. Caldwell, Etienne Danchin, Guillaume Isabel, Lucas Molleman, Thom Scott-Phillips, Monica Tamariz, Pieter van den Berg, Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen, Maxime Derex
Summary: Cultural evolution is not only caused by social learning, but involves multiple mechanisms acting together, and research should be more diversified. Research should span different levels of organization, including neural, cognitive-behavioral, and populational levels, to delve into various aspects of cultural evolution. Studying mechanisms across levels can increase explanatory power and reveal gaps and misconceptions in knowledge.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Cindel J. M. White, Michael Muthukrishna, Ara Norenzayan
Summary: This study found that individuals who shared the same religious tradition and level of commitment to religion were more culturally similar, and distances between denominations within a world religion echoed shared historical descent. Even after excluding overtly religious values, the cultural similarity of coreligionists remained robust.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Abby Chopoorian, Yakov Pichkar, Nicole Creanza
Summary: Language is crucial for human understanding, but its origin and evolution remain a challenge. Researchers study birdsong divergence to uncover cultural evolution patterns. Understanding how learning and cultural traits interact at the population level is important for studying cultural evolution.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biology
Bill Thompson, Thomas L. Griffiths
Summary: The study suggests that biases in human cognition can restrict technological advancement and knowledge transmission, as participants tend to converge on worse solutions in environments misaligned with their biases. The results highlight formal relationships between cultural evolution and distributed stochastic optimization, emphasizing concerns about bias in creative, scientific, and educational contexts.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Biology
T. Gruber, M. Chimento, L. M. Aplin, D. Biro
Summary: Recent studies have shown that animal culture can become more efficient in various contexts, satisfying the criteria of cumulative cultural evolution. However, there is still no consensus on the definition of efficiency, cumulative cultural evolution, or the link between efficiency and complex forms of cumulative cultural evolution unique to humans. To address these issues, this article reviews potential evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in animals, provides a useful definition of efficiency by synthesizing perspectives from animal studies and iterated learning literature, and discusses the factors that affect the informational bottleneck of social transmission. The article concludes that framing cumulative cultural evolution in terms of efficiency sheds new light on complexity, as learnable behaviors are essential for its evolution.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Mohammad Atari, Joseph Henrich
Summary: A growing body of evidence indicates that psychology has culturally evolved over time. Various approaches, such as experimental data, cross-cultural comparisons, and studies of immigrants, suggest systematic changes in domains like conformity, attention, emotion, morality, and olfaction. To overcome the challenge of limited historical data, computational methods from natural language processing can be used to extract psychological information from historical corpora. These methods, including dictionary-based, distributed-representational, and human-annotation-based techniques, provide valuable insights into the records of past minds. It is important to move beyond English-centric text analysis in historical psychology to foster a more inclusive and generalizable science of human behavior.
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
History & Philosophy Of Science
Cecilia Heyes
Summary: Research on moral learning explores the roles of domain-general processes like Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning in the development of moral beliefs and values. The study emphasizes the importance of discovering the contributions of nature, nurture, and culture to moral development, but also highlights the need to overcome nativist bias and differentiate between learning from others and learning about others.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
D. Kimbrough Oller, Ulrike Griebel
Summary: The exploratory vocalizations made by hominin infants may have helped parents trust in the wellness and viability of their offspring, leading to increased investment in them. This selection for vocal fitness provided a critical inclination and capability relevant to the evolution of language. However, the presumed barrier of honesty in communication may not actually be a significant obstacle to the evolution of language.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Psychology
Joseph Henrich, Michael Muthukrishna
Summary: Humans are an ultrasocial species and the evolutionary mechanisms behind human cooperation involve the interactions between genetic and cultural factors, as well as the synthesis of empirical evidence from studies across diverse societies.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY, VOL 72
(2021)
Article
History & Philosophy Of Science
Marieke Woensdregt, Chris Cummins, Kenny Smith
Summary: This study investigates how language interacts with the theory of mind abilities of humans through cultural evolution. The computational model shows that the informative lexicon plays a crucial role in helping agents infer others' perspectives, leading to better communication success.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Andrew Whiten
Summary: Culture, acquired through social learning, is found to be pervasive in both human and animal lives. Animals acquire knowledge and skills through social learning processes, and there may be forms of cumulative culture present in animal lives.
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2021)
Review
Psychology
Michael Muthukrishna, Joseph Henrich, Edward Slingerland
Summary: Psychology traditionally focused on universal human cognition and is now starting to explore cross-cultural variations. However, it has neglected cross-temporal variations which can be found in historical texts and artifacts. By utilizing these sources, psychology can expand its research scope and gain a deeper understanding of human cognition and behavior.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY, VOL 72
(2021)