Serial killers, spiders and cybersex: Social and survival information bias in the transmission of urban legends

Stubbersfield, Joseph M.; Tehrani, Jamshid J.; Flynn, Emma

doi:10.1111/bjop.12073

Cited by 93 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(85 reference statements)

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“…Transmission chain studies have shown that certain kinds of information are preferentially transmitted. A result replicated by several independent labs is that information about social relationships is transmitted with higher fidelity than equivalent non-social information (McGuigan and Cubillo 2013; Mesoudi et al 2006;Reysen et al 2011;Stubbersfield et al 2014), as predicted by social brain theories of the biological evolution of primate cognition (Dunbar 2003). There is also experimental support for a bias for emotionally salient disgust-inducing information (Eriksson and Coultas 2014;Heath et al 2001).…”

Section: Cognitive Biases Can Drive Cultural Evolution Towards Culturmentioning

confidence: 91%

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

2015

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The last two decades have seen an explosion in research analysing cultural change as a Darwinian evolutionary process. Here I provide an overview of the theory of cultural evolution, including its intellectual history, major theoretical tenets and methods, key findings, and prominent criticisms and controversies. 'Culture' is defined as socially transmitted information. Cultural evolution is the theory that this socially transmitted information evolves in the manner laid out by Darwin in The Origin of Species, i.e. it comprises a system of variation, differential fitness and inheritance. Cultural evolution is not, however, neo-Darwinian, in that many of the details of genetic evolution may not apply, such as particulate inheritance and random mutation. Following a brief history of this idea, I review theoretical and empirical studies of cultural microevolution, which entails both selection-like processes wherein some cultural variants are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than others, plus transformative processes that alter cultural information during transmission. I also review how phylogenetic methods have been used to reconstruct cultural macroevolution, including the evolution of languages, technology and social organisation. Finally, I discuss recent controversies and debates, including the extent to which culture is proximate or ultimate, the relative role of selective and transformative processes in cultural evolution, the basis of cumulative cultural evolution, the evolution of large-scale human cooperation, and whether social learning is learned or innate. I conclude by highlighting the value of using evolutionary methods to study culture for both the social and biological sciences.

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Section: Cognitive Biases Can Drive Cultural Evolution Towards Culturmentioning

confidence: 91%

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

2015

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“…These include: i) a bias for survival-relevant information, such as predators, the location of food, access to resources, reproductive strategies (e.g. Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2015); ii) a bias for social information, e.g. about peoples' relations and interactions with one another (e.g.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…about peoples' relations and interactions with one another (e.g. Mesoudi, Whiten, & Dunbar, 2006;Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2015); iii) a bias for emotionally arousing content, such as disgust, or amusement (Eriksson & Coultas, 2014;Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2017); iv) a bias for minimally-counterintuitive (MCI) information that violates some of our implicit ontological assumptions about the world in ways that makes it more salient than information that can either be taken-for-granted or is incomprehensible (e.g. Barrett & Nyhof, 2001); v) a stereotype-consistency bias, in which information is transformed and recalled in ways that make it more consistent with pre-existing expectations and prejudices (e.g.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural complexity and demography: The case of folktales

Acerbi

Kendal

Tehrani

2017

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T2 Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales AbstractWe investigate the relationship between cultural complexity and population size in a nontechnological cultural domain for which we have suitable quantitative records: folktales. We define three levels of complexity for folk narratives: the number of tale types, the number of narrative motifs, and, finally, the number of traits in variants of the same type, for two well known tales for which we have data from previous studies. We found a positive relationship between number of tale types and population size, a negative relationship for the number of narrative motifs, and no relationship for the number of traits. The absence of a consistent relationship between population size and complexity in folktales provides a novel perspective on the current debates in cultural evolution. We propose that the link between cultural complexity and demography could be domain dependent: in some domains (e.g. technology)this link is important, whereas in others, such as folktales, complex traditions can be easily maintained in small populations as well as large ones, as they may appeal to universal cognitive biases.

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“…Selection-like "content" or "direct" biases favor the acquisition and transmission of some cultural variants over others due to their memorability or effectiveness (14,15), just as some alleles have higher fitness than others. Random cultural "mutation" occurs where new variation arises randomly, such as via perceptual error (16), akin to random genetic mutation.…”

Section: Cultural Microevolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution

Mesoudi

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of beliefs, skills, knowledge, languages, institutions, and other forms of socially transmitted information. Here, I review current progress in the pursuit of an evolutionary science of culture that is grounded in both biological and evolutionary theory, but also treats culture as more than a proximate mechanism that is directly controlled by genes. Both genetic and cultural evolution can be described as systems of inherited variation that change over time in response to processes such as selection, migration, and drift. Appropriate differences between genetic and cultural change are taken seriously, such as the possibility in the latter of nonrandomly guided variation or transformation, blending inheritance, and one-to-many transmission. The foundation of cultural evolution was laid in the late 20th century with population-genetic style models of cultural microevolution, and the use of phylogenetic methods to reconstruct cultural macroevolution. Since then, there have been major efforts to understand the sociocognitive mechanisms underlying cumulative cultural evolution, the consequences of demography on cultural evolution, the empirical validity of assumed social learning biases, the relative role of transformative and selective processes, and the use of quantitative phylogenetic and multilevel selection models to understand past and present dynamics of society-level change. I conclude by highlighting the interdisciplinary challenges of studying cultural evolution, including its relation to the traditional social sciences and humanities. cultural evolution | cumulative culture | gene-culture coevolution | human evolution | social learningThe formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. . . Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, p 90T his quote from Charles Darwin (1) draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the genetic evolution of species, and on the other, cultural change (i.e., changes in socially learned information, such as beliefs, knowledge, tools, technology, attitudes, norms, and, as Darwin mentions, languages). This idea is the basic premise of cultural evolution: Cultural change constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary process that shares key characteristics with the genetic evolution of species. The emergence of this second evolutionary process saw an unprecedented extension of genetic evolution by allowing organisms to adapt more rapidly to, and more powerfully create and shape, their environments.Since the 1980s, this parallel between genetic and cultural evolution has been pursued by scholars from a range of disciplines across the social, behavioral, and biological sciences. In this article, I review the current state of this interdisciplinary effort, focusing on topics of major recent research interest. No new theories...

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Serial killers, spiders and cybersex: Social and survival information bias in the transmission of urban legends

Cited by 93 publications

References 62 publications

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

Cultural complexity and demography: The case of folktales

Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution

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