Alberto Acerbi. Selection versus attraction in cultural evolution. Two empirical cases
Thursday, Dec 8, at 18:15, in Ülikooli 16-109
Abstract. I characterise some recent debates in cultural evolution as exploring two main issues: (i) the degree to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative process, where traits are copied with relatively high fidelity and errors are random, or a transformative process, with low copying fidelity and “errors” oriented toward attractors; and (ii) the relative importance of domain-general context biases (such as conformity or prestige bias, etc.) versus stable, domain specific, and mainly cognitive, biases.
I have previously argued that these views are not incompatible, but they reflect an interest in different aspects of cultural dynamics. Far from representing an impasse for cultural evolutionary studies, these debates can suggest new researches. Here I will present two ongoing empirical studies. The first concerns the relation between cultural complexity and demography in a cultural domain in which cognitive attraction may have an important role: folktales. The second study examines how context and content biases interact in determining preferences for “famous” quotes.
Short bio. I’m a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist with a particular interest in computational science. My empirical works are grounded in an interest for theoretical questions in cultural evolution and cognitive anthropology: I study the relative importance of various forces and biases in cultural evolution, such as selection, cultural attraction, and others, and what they tell us about the conceptualisation of cultural change.
[Also, Alberto Acerbi’s Google Scholar Profile and his blog.]
Relevant articles
- Claidière N, Scott-Phillips TC, Sperber D (2014) How Darwinian is cultural evolution? Philos Trans R Soc B 369, 20130368
- Acerbi, A., Mesoudi, A. (2015), If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution, Biology & Philosophy, 30(4), 481-503
- Acerbi, A., Kendal, J., Tehrani, J.J. (preprint), Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales, SocArXiv, Open Science Foundation
- Sperber D, Hirschfeld LA (2004) The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends Cogn Sci 8, 40–46
- Acerbi, A. (2016), A cultural evolution approach to digital media, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 636 (mainly the section on “Transmission biases in the digital age”)