Related papers: Is Human Culture Locked by Evolution?
Recommender systems have gained increasing attention to personalise consumer preferences. While these systems have primarily focused on applications such as advertisement recommendations (e.g., Google), personalized suggestions (e.g.,…
Cultural activity is an inherent aspect of urban life and the success of a modern city is largely determined by its capacity to offer generous cultural entertainment to its citizens. To this end, the optimal allocation of cultural…
In this work we investigate the sociocultural values learned by large language models (LLMs). We introduce a novel open-access dataset, Sociocultural Statements, constructed from natural debate statements using a multi-step methodology. The…
Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behavior of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent…
In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Culture is a collection of connected and potentially interactive patterns that characterize a social group or a passed-on idea that people acquire as members of society. While offline activities can provide a better picture of the…
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…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
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,…
As we navigate our cultural environment, we learn cultural biases, like those around gender, social class, health, and body weight. It is unclear, however, exactly how public culture becomes private culture. In this paper, we provide a…
This paper compares historical annotations by humans and Large Language Models. The findings reveal that both exhibit some cultural bias, but Large Language Models achieve a higher consensus on the interpretation of historical facts from…
The diverse range of Internet enabled devices both mobile and fixed has not only impacted the global economy but the very fabric of human communications and lifestyles. The ease of access and lowered cost has enabled hitherto diametrically…
Designing systems that can reason across cultures requires that they are grounded in the norms of the contexts in which they operate. However, current research on developing computational models of social norms has primarily focused on…
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…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
Building upon the considerable advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we are now equipped to address more sophisticated tasks demanding a nuanced understanding of cross-cultural contexts. A key example is recipe adaptation, which goes…
Daily life activities, such as eating and sleeping, are deeply influenced by a person's culture, hence generating differences in the way a same activity is performed by individuals belonging to different cultures. We argue that taking…
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all…