Related papers: On Selfish Memes
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
"Standard" information theory says nothing about the semantic content of information. Nevertheless, applications such as evolutionary theory demand consideration of precisely this aspect of information, a need that has motivated a largely…
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what…
Language models are known to exhibit various forms of cultural bias in decision-making tasks, yet much less is known about their degree of cultural familiarity in open-ended text generation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the task of…
Cultural algorithm is a kind of evolutionary algorithm inspired from societal evolution and is composed of a belief space, a population space and a protocol that enables exchange of knowledge between these sources. Knowledge created in the…
We consider biological individuality in terms of information theoretic and graphical principles. Our purpose is to extract through an algorithmic decomposition system-environment boundaries supporting individuality. We infer or detect…
Online memes are a powerful yet challenging medium for content moderation, often masking harmful intent behind humor, irony, or cultural symbolism. Conventional moderation systems "especially those relying on explicit text" frequently fail…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative…
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…
Internet memes, now a staple of digital communication, play a pivotal role in how users engage within online communities and allow researchers to gain insight into contemporary digital culture. These engaging user-generated content are…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
Interest in the research areas related to meme propagation and generation has been increasing rapidly in the last couple of years. Meme datasets available online are either specific to a context or contain no class information. Here, we…
Where do the most popular online cultural artifacts such as image memes originate? Media narratives suggest that cultural innovations often originate in peripheral communities and then diffuse to the mainstream core; behavioral science…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
Conspiracy theories, or in general seriously distorted beliefs, are widespread. How and why are they formed in the brain is still more a matter of speculation rather than science. In this paper one plausible mechanisms is investigated:…
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…
This paper investigates cultural dynamics in social media by examining the proliferation and diversification of clearly-cut pieces of content: quoted texts. In line with the pioneering work of Leskovec et al. and Simmons et al. on memes…
Memes are becoming a useful source of data for analyzing behavior on social media. However, a problem to tackle is how to correctly identify a meme. As the number of memes published every day on social media is huge, there is a need for…
This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first…