Related papers: On Selfish Memes
In open-ended generative tasks like narrative writing or dialogue, large language models often exhibit cultural biases, showing limited knowledge and generating templated outputs for less prevalent cultures. Recent works show that these…
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a critical component of intelligence but its assessment remains the subject of heated debates. Prior research applied human ToM assessments to natural language processing models using either human-created…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
Internet memes have emerged as a novel format for communication and expressing ideas on the web. Their fluidity and creative nature are reflected in their widespread use, often across platforms and occasionally for unethical or harmful…
The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
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…
It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB)…
Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…
Memes have become a distinctive and effective form of communication in the digital era, attracting online communities and cutting across cultural barriers. Even though memes are frequently linked with humor, they have an amazing capacity to…
Social conventions govern countless behaviors all of us engage in every day, from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. But how can shared conventions emerge spontaneously in the absence of a central coordinating authority? The…
This article explains how natural selection works and how it has been inappropriately applied to the description of cultural change. It proposes an alternative evolutionary explanation for cultural evolution that describes it in terms of…
Tremendous efforts have been put into evaluating the inclusivity and effectiveness of AI systems across cultures. However, the cultural capabilities considered in much of the literature remain vaguely defined, are referred to using…
Online memes have emerged as powerful digital cultural artifacts in the age of social media, offering not only humor but also platforms for political discourse, social critique, and information dissemination. Their extensive reach and…
EVOC is a computer model of the EVOlution of Culture. It consists of neural network based agents that invent ideas for actions, and imitate neighbors' actions. EVOC replicates using a different fitness function the results obtained with an…
Parody is a figurative device used to imitate an entity for comedic or critical purposes and represents a widespread phenomenon in social media through many popular parody accounts. In this paper, we present the first computational study of…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to creativity. In a social group it is not necessary for all members to be creative to benefit from creativity; some merely imitate or enjoy the fruits of others' creative efforts. What proportion…
Ironies can not only express stronger emotions but also show a sense of humor. With the development of social media, ironies are widely used in public. Although many prior research studies have been conducted in irony detection, few studies…
Understanding the evolution of human social systems requires flexible formalisms for the emergence of institutions. Although game theory is normally used to model interactions individually, larger spaces of games can be helpful for modeling…
We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…
This work builds on a rich discourse surrounding the social brain hypothesis as well as the definition and quantification of social complexity. We believe this manuscript provides a new perspective on the topic by pairing a conceptual…