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Why is our society multicultural? Based on the two mechanisms of homophily and social influence, the classical model for the dissemination of cultures proposed by Axelrod predicts the existence of a fragmented regime where different…

Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…

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…

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,…

Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…

Understanding the collective dynamics behind the success of ideas, products, behaviors, and social actors is critical for decision-making across diverse contexts, including hiring, funding, career choices, and the design of interventions…

Large language models have become the latest trend in natural language processing, heavily featuring in the digital tools we use every day. However, their replies often reflect a narrow cultural viewpoint that overlooks the diversity of…

Designing recommendation systems that serve content aligned with time varying preferences requires proper accounting of the feedback effects of recommendations on human behavior and psychological condition. We argue that modeling the…

The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…

Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…

Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…

We introduce a general modeling framework to predict the outcomes, at the population level, of individual psychology and behavior. The framework prescribes that researchers build a cost function that embodies knowledge of what trait values…

Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…

The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…

An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…

Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct…

Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…

To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…

We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success…