Journal ArticleDOI
A Bayesian approach to the evolution of social learning
TLDR
A Bayesian model in which both individual and social learning arise from a single inferential process is presented, indicating that natural selection favors individuals who place heavy weight on social cues when the environment changes slowly or when its state cannot be well predicted using nonsocial cues.About:
This article is published in Evolution and Human Behavior.The article was published on 2012-09-01. It has received 82 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Social learning & Observational learning.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.
Ara Norenzayan,Azim F. Shariff,Will M. Gervais,Aiyana K. Willard,Rita Anne McNamara,Edward Slingerland,Joseph Henrich +6 more
TL;DR: It is explained how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict.
Journal ArticleDOI
The when and who of social learning and conformist transmission
TL;DR: This article found that both social learning and the strength of conformist transmission increase with the number of traits, the adaptive value of those traits, and the fidelity of transmission, but only when there were two traits in the environment.
Journal ArticleDOI
Teaching and the life history of cultural transmission in Fijian villages.
TL;DR: Using three interviews conducted with rural Fijian populations, it is found that parents are more likely to teach than are other kin types, high-skill and highly valued domains are morelikely to be taught, and oblique transmission is associated with high- skill domains, which are learned later in life.
Journal ArticleDOI
The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins
Mauricio Cantor,Hal Whitehead +1 more
TL;DR: This work reviews attempts to model the links between the spread, persistence and diversity of culture and the network topology of non-human societies and recommends the integration of studies ofculture and society in species for which social learning is an important determinant of behaviour.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Culture and the evolutionary process
Robert Boyd,Peter J. Richerson +1 more
TL;DR: Using methods developed by population biologists, a theory of cultural evolution is proposed that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.
MonographDOI
Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution.
Peter J. Richerson,Robert Boyd +1 more
TL;DR: "Not by Genes Alone" offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that the authors' ecological dominance and their singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture.
Book
Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach
TL;DR: A mathematical theory of the non-genetic transmission of cultural traits is developed that provides a framework for future investigations in quantitative social and anthropological science and concludes that cultural transmission is an essential factor in the study of cultural change.