Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying

Bentley, R. Alexander; Lipo, Carl P.; Herzog, Harold; Hahn, Matthew W.

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2006.10.002

Cited by 167 publications

(194 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…While broadly consistent with the evolutionary predictions discussed above, these empirical patterns are not consistent with alternative cultural evolutionary models that assume (i) purely individual learning Lehmann et al (2008), (ii) all parental or unbiased transmission Bentley et al (2007), or (iii) some combination of parental transmission and individual learning-guided variation (Boyd & Richerson 1985). These models are not consistent because selective learning biases, which are not part of these models, appear to be an important mechanism in sustaining the adaptive patterns we observed.…”

Section: Fijian Food Taboosmentioning

confidence: 60%

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

2010

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The application of evolutionary theory to understanding the origins of our species' capacities for social learning has generated key insights into cultural evolution. By focusing on how our psychology has evolved to adaptively extract beliefs and practices by observing others, theorists have hypothesized how social learning can, over generations, give rise to culturally evolved adaptations. While much field research documents the subtle ways in which culturally transmitted beliefs and practices adapt people to their local environments, and much experimental work reveals the predicted patterns of social learning, little research connects real-world adaptive cultural traits to the patterns of transmission predicted by these theories. Addressing this gap, we show how food taboos for pregnant and lactating women in Fiji selectively target the most toxic marine species, effectively reducing a woman's chances of fish poisoning by 30 per cent during pregnancy and 60 per cent during breastfeeding. We further analyse how these taboos are transmitted, showing support for cultural evolutionary models that combine familial transmission with selective learning from locally prestigious individuals. In addition, we explore how particular aspects of human cognitive processes increase the frequency of some non-adaptive taboos. This case demonstrates how evolutionary theory can be deployed to explain both adaptive and non-adaptive behavioural patterns.

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Section: Fijian Food Taboosmentioning

confidence: 60%

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

2010

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“…Bentley and colleagues (Bentley, Hahn, & Shennan, 2004;Bentley, Lipo, Herzog, & Hahn, 2007) have used data from popularity charts of baby names, music sales, and dog breeds, finding that the steady rates of turnover observed in each are consistent with random copying. The implication of this is that changes in the frequencies of such cultural traits over time will be determined purely by random events (analogous to neutral genetic drift).…”

Section: Transmission Chain Designsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human cumulative culture in the laboratory: Effects of (micro) population size

Caldwell

Millen

2010

Learning & Behavior

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In much of the experimental literature on social learning, the ecological validity of the social context is often sacrificed in the interests of greater control over the material to which the participants are exposed. It is by no means a criticism to draw attention to the tight control involved in these designs, and indeed, such approaches have p proven to be highly successful in recent years, resulting in important advances in both the nonhuman and human social-learning literature.For example, using such methods, Horner and Whiten (2005) were able to show intriguing differences between chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children in terms of the elements of a demonstration that were copied. Following a demonstration by an adult human experimenter, the chimpanzees omitted actions that app peared not to be causally related to the goal (of extracting a reward from the experimental apparatus). In contrast, young children, 3-4 years of age, copied all the elements of the demonstration, irrespective of how relevant to the goal they appeared to be. Whiten, Horner, Litchfield, and Marshall-Pescini (2004) reviewed numerous studies of social learning in nonhuman primates in which similar methods were used. Children's language learning has also b been studied using similar dyadic experimenter-subject designs. Experiments have shown that young children can readily incorporate novel nonsense words into their vocabulary and use these appropriately, after hearing such words spoken by an adult experimenter (for a review, see Tomasello, 2000). The effects of social influences on adult humans have also been studied in a similar fashion, with manipulations achieved through the actions of experimental confederates. Experiments by Sherif (1936) and Asch (1955) showed that participants asked to make a simple perceptual judgment would alter their responses if these were not consistent with responses given by actors posing as fellow participants in the same experiment. In a more recent study following the same basic logic, Eriksson and Coultas (2009) found that participants' responses to opinion questionnaire items could be influenced by the apparent responses of previous participants (which were actually faked, in order to directly manipulate the magnitude of the apparent majority).As these studies illustrate, controlled manipulations of modeled behaviors can reveal much about what can be transmitted. And yet, when we look at real cultures and traditions-that is, those that occur spontaneously in natural populations-there is an inevitable shift of focus, due to the kind of data involved. Different issues arise as the important questions, and a rather different perspective tends to be taken, with populations, rather than individuals, representing the principal units of study.For example, research on traditions in nonhuman primates began with reports of novel behaviors spreading through populations. Early reports of this kind were given for Japanese macaques, Macaca fuscata , concerning a number of new behaviors, including food wa...

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“…Delay and memory mechanisms have been invoked for explaining these dynamics [7]. Furthermore, analysis of the distribution of first names versus popularity suggested that the process of name choice could be random copying [8][9][10]. A recent study [11] proposes that first names are chosen based on their phoneme structure, which are, in fact, the objects of fashion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diffusion dynamics of choice: From durable goods markets to fashion first names

Coulmont¹,

Breban

2016

Complexity

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Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms. In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast sales of innovative goods. Inspired by the theory of diffusion processes developed for marketing economics, we propose a modelling framework for the mechanism of fashion, which we apply to first names. Analyses of French, Dutch, and US national databases validate our modelling approach for thousands of first names, covering, on average, more than 50% of the yearly incidence in each database. In these cases, it is thus possible to study how first names become popular and when they run out of fashion. Furthermore, we uncover a clear distinction between popularity and fashion: less popular names, typically not included in studies of fashion, may be driven by fashion, as well.

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Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying

Cited by 167 publications

References 36 publications

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

Human cumulative culture in the laboratory: Effects of (micro) population size

The diffusion dynamics of choice: From durable goods markets to fashion first names

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