Related papers: Modeling Cultural Dynamics
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative…
Epidemic models study the spread of an undesired agent through a population, be it infectious diseases through a country, misinformation in online social media, or pests infesting a region. In combating these epidemics, we rely neither on…
Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of…
Evolutionary game dynamics describes not only frequency dependent genetical evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update…
We address the problem of diversification in religions by studying selection on cultural memes that colonize humans hosts. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for…
The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures, which include several individual cognitive biases, demographic factors and social network structures. The…
Cultural algorithm is a kind of evolutionary algorithm inspired from societal evolution and is composed of a belief space, a population space and a protocol that enables exchange of knowledge between these sources. Knowledge created in the…
Evolution gave rise to human and animal intelligence here on Earth. We argue that the path to developing artificial human-like-intelligence will pass through mimicking the evolutionary process in a nature-like simulation. In Nature, there…
Axelrod's model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation…
Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of…
Culture is core to human civilization, and is essential for human intellectual achievements in social context. Culture also influences how humans work together, perform particular task and overall lifestyle and dealing with other groups of…
The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
This chapter synthesizes evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychological studies, and computational models for a complex systems inspired theory of creativity, and its role in cultural evolution. Creativity…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…