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How does our society appreciate the uniqueness of cultural products? This fundamental puzzle has intrigued scholars in many fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and marketing. It has been theorized that cultural products…
We investigate how well traditional fiction genres like Fantasy, Thriller, and Literature represent readers' preferences. Using user data from Goodreads we construct a book network where two books are strongly linked if the same people tend…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
Good storytelling involves surprise -- unpredictability in how the story unfolds -- and sense-making, the requirement that the story forms a coherent sequence. However, to date, these two qualities have largely been addressed in isolation.…
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…
Novelty attracts attention like popularity. Hence predicting novelty is as important as popularity. Novelty is the side effect of competition and aging in evolving systems. Recent behavior or recent link gain in networks plays an important…
The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
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…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
We propose a simple model of an idealized online cultural market in which $N$ items, endowed with a hidden quality metric, are recommended to users by a ranking algorithm possibly biased by the current items' popularity. Our goal is to…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
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…
Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of…
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 paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…
Is more novel research always desirable? We develop a model in which knowledge shapes society's policies and guides the search for discoveries. Researchers select a question and how intensely to study it. The novelty of a question…
The World Wide Web is fast becoming a source of information for a large part of the world's population. Because of its sheer size and complexity users often resort to recommendations from others to decide which sites to visit. We present a…
The explosive growth of information challenges people's capability in finding out items fitting to their own interests. Recommender systems provide an efficient solution by automatically push possibly relevant items to users according to…