Monday, August 07, 2017

An article on cultural evolution


Sample :"Even 14-18-month old infants seem to have better recall for actions when they are modelled by three- year-olds than by adults (Ryalls, Gul, & Ryalls, 2000). It is also well established that children have strong same- sex biases in their learning preferences (Rosekrans, 1967; Shutts et al., 2010; Wolf, 1973). Adults, meanwhile, seem more susceptible to social influence by those who share their existing beliefs (Hilmert et al., 2006).
Another important theoretical result is that the existence of an evolving cultural corpus can readily give rise to ethnicitiesi.e., symbolically marked groups (McElreath, Boyd, & Richerson, 2003). Once your fitness depends on culturally transmitted strategies for interaction, and all your peers’ fitnesses do too, local norms can become critically important (Maciej Chudek & Henrich, 2011), and it makes sense to use arbitrary signals (like accent, dress style, tattoos, body mutilation, etc.) to preferentially identify, interact with and learn from co-ethnics." 
Cultural evolution by Maciej Chudek
School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University
Michael Muthukrishna University of British Columbia Department of Psychology
Joseph Henrich
University of British Columbia Department of Psychology Department of Economics 

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