Related papers: Modeling Cultural Dynamics
Religions are among the most consequential social institutions, shaping collective identities, moral norms, and political organization across societies and historical periods. Nevertheless, despite extensive scholarship describing…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
We report a summary of our interdisciplinary research project "Evolutionary Perspective on Collective Decision Making" that was conducted through close collaboration between computational, organizational and social scientists at Binghamton…
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…
Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory asserts that cultural similarity among individuals plays a crucial role in the acceptance of an innovation in a community. However, most studies on the diffusion of innovations have relied on…
We consider a model of cultural evolution for a strategy selection in a population of individuals who interact in a game theoretic framework. The evolution combines individual learning of the environment (population strategy profile),…
The diffusion of ideas is often closely connected to the creation and diffusion of knowledge and to the technological evolution of society. Because of this, knowledge creation, exchange and its subsequent transformation into innovations for…
In this work, we investigate how autonomous agents, organized into tribes, learn to use communication signals to coordinate their activities and enhance their collective efficiency. Using the NEC-DAC (Neurally Encoded Culture - Distributed…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
We present an individual based model of cultural evolution, where interacting agents are coded by binary strings standing for strategies for action, blueprints for products or attitudes and beliefs. The model is patterned on an established…
In studies of cultural differentiation, the joint mechanisms of homophily and influence have been able to explain how distinct cultural groups can form. While these mechanisms normally lead to cultural convergence, increased levels of…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…
Successfully integrating newcomers into native communities has become a key issue for policy makers, as the growing number of migrants has brought cultural diversity, new skills, and at times, societal tensions to receiving countries. We…