Maintenance of cultural diversity: Social roles, social networks, and cognitive networks

Abrams, Marshall

doi:10.1017/s0140525x13002811

“…More generally, social identities may be shaped through the course of group membership, such that group membership acts as a scaffold toward role development. Abrams (2014) has proposed that as social organization persists and individuals take on different social roles, the intrinsic organizational structure may encourage 'cohesive cognitive subnetworks,' which in turn will cause individuals who take on similar roles in different groups to become increasingly similar. In other words, the environmental effect of participating in a group-level endeavor may lead to a number of cognitive and behavioral similarities among individuals occupying similar social roles, above and beyond those necessary for performing those roles.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Identity and Cooperation in Cultural Evolution

Smaldino¹

2017

Preprint

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I discuss the function of social identity signaling in facilitating cooperative group formation, and how the nature of that function changes with the structure of social organization. I propose that signals of social identity facilitate assortment for successful coordination in large-scale societies, and that the multidimensional, context-dependent nature of social identity is crucial for successful coordination when individuals have to cooperate in different contexts. Furthermore, the structure of social identity is tied to the structure of society, so that as societies grow larger and more interconnected, the landscape of social identities grows more heterogeneous. This discussion bears directly on the need to articulate the dynamics of emergent, ephemeral groups as a major factor in human cultural evolution.

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Social identity and cooperation in cultural evolution

Smaldino

¹

2019

Behavioural Processes

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I discuss the function of social identity signaling in facilitating cooperative group formation, and how the nature of that function changes with the structure of social organization. I propose that signals of social identity facilitate assortment for successful coordination in large-scale societies, and that the multidimensional, context-dependent nature of social identity is crucial for successful coordination when individuals have to cooperate in different contexts. Furthermore, the structure of social identity is tied to the structure of society, so that as societies grow larger and more interconnected, the landscape of social identities grows more heterogeneous. This discussion bears directly on the need to articulate the dynamics of emergent, ephemeral groups as a major factor in human cultural evolution.

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Coherence, Muller’s Ratchet, and the Maintenance of Culture

Abrams¹

2015

Philos. of Sci.

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I investigate the structure of an argument that culture cannot be maintained in a population if each individual acquires a given cultural variant from a single person. I note two puzzling consequences of the argument: It appears to conflict with (a) many models of cultural transmission and (b) real-world cases of cultural transmission. I resolve the first puzzle by showing that one of the models central to the argument is conceptually analogous and mathematically equivalent to one used to investigate the evolution of sexual reproduction. This analogy clarifies what assumptions are crucial to the argument concerning cultural transmission. I resolve the second puzzle by arguing that probabilistic models of epistemological coherence can be reinterpreted as models of mutual support between cultural variants. I develop a model of cultural transmission illustrating this proposal. I suggest that real-world cases that seem to conflict with the original argument may in fact be instances in which mutually supporting cultural variants are learned from different individuals.

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Maintenance of cultural diversity: Social roles, social networks, and cognitive networks

Cited by 3 publications

References 214 publications

Social Identity and Cooperation in Cultural Evolution

Social Identity and Cooperation in Cultural Evolution

Social identity and cooperation in cultural evolution

Coherence, Muller’s Ratchet, and the Maintenance of Culture

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