Related papers: Five clarifications about cultural evolution

Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…

Despite substantial research efforts evaluating how well large language models~(LLMs) handle global cultural diversity, the mechanisms behind their cultural knowledge acquisition, particularly in multilingual settings, remain unclear. We…

Many researchers have identified distribution shift as a likely contributor to the reproducibility crisis in behavioral and biomedical sciences. The idea is that if treatment effects vary across individual characteristics and experimental…

When a prediction algorithm serves a collection of users, disparities in prediction quality are likely to emerge. If users respond to accurate predictions by increasing engagement, inviting friends, or adopting trends, repeated learning…

The Central Dogma of molecular biology, as originally proposed by Crick, asserts that information passed into protein cannot flow back out. This principle has been interpreted as underpinning modern understandings of heredity and evolution,…

Axelrod 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 of…

Spatial separation is often included in models of ethnic divergence but it has also been realised that urban subcultures can, and frequently do, emerge in sympatry. Previous research tended to attribute this phenomenon to the human tendency…

We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…

Providing natural language explanations for recommendations is particularly useful from the perspective of a non-expert user. Although several methods for providing such explanations have recently been proposed, we argue that an important…

Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…

Cooperation is of utmost importance to society as a whole, but is often challenged by individual self-interests. While game theory has studied this problem extensively, there is little work on interactions within and across groups with…

Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…

In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…

The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…

Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…

Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…

Beauty standards shape self-perception and health through social comparison and objectification, while exposure to idealized imagery exacerbates body-image concerns. Media and fashion are central arbiters of these ideals, yet long-term,…

We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…

This chapter begins by outlining a promising, new theoretical framework for the process by which human culture evolves inspired by the views of complexity theorists on the problem of how life began. Elements of culture, like species, evolve…