Tag Archives: conformist bias

Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change

Summary from Twitter thread:

New paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR): Societies more susceptible to social learning (e.g. China) more culturally stable, but also more susceptible to rapid transformation. Punctuated cultural equilibrium. Models differences in cross-cultural social networks and influence. Why? 1/3

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868319855783?journalCode=psra

Consider Majority illusion (Blue Fashionable will be perceived as majority view due to social network structure).

Some societies more likely to conform. Under most conditions, conforming to the majority leads to stability, but… 2/3

A well connected ideologue taking advantage of that conformity leads to rapid social change.

In a less well connected society with fewer conformists, too many leaders, not enough followers making it harder for one to dominate and kickstart a country-wide revolution. 3/3

Cultural Evolution – Chapter in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd Edition

Maciek Chudek, Joe Henrich, and I wrote an introduction to Cultural Evolution in the most recent Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd edition – edited by David Buss.

The chapter provides a brief overview of the science of cultural evolution, including its psychological foundations and implications. We discuss how humans evolved a second-line of inheritance, crossing the threshold into a world of cumulative culture. We begin by asking how culture can evolve, dispelling the mythical requirement of discrete genes and exact replication.

Evolutionary adaptation has three basic requirements: (1) individuals vary, (2) this variability is heritable (information transmission occurs), and (3) some variants are more likely to survive and spread than others. Genes have these characteristics so they evolve and adaptive. Culture also meets all three requirements, but in different ways. Like bacterial genes, cultural information spreads horizontally and need not be limited to parental transmission to offspring.

We discuss the evolution of our capacity for culture, asking how and when capacities for culture will evolve (when is cultural learning genetically adaptive).

The answer: culture is adaptive when asocial learning is hard and environments fluctuate a lot, but not too much.

We also outline the evolution of some of our social learning biases (a large part of the third requirement of an evolutionary system):

  1. Who we learn from (e.g. skilled, successful, and prestigious models; conformist transmission)
  2. What moderates these choices (e.g. self-similarity, age, sex, ethnicity; Credibility Enhancing Displays, CREDs).
  3. Some examples in the real world, such as the social spread of suicides (Werther effect) and literally learning better from same-sex and same-race instructors.
  4. Content biases on what to learn: e.g.  animals and plants, dangers, fire, reputation, social norms, and social groupings.

Cultural evolution shapes the beliefs and behaviors of groups so that they come adapted to the local environment (including culture) over time, shaping preferences and psychology.

Turning to the population-level, we explain why sociality influences cultural complexity (larger, more interconnected populations have more terms and technologies), how cultural evolution can lead to maladaptive behavior, and how intergroup competition can help eliminate these maladaptive behaviors, briefly discussing the viability of cultural-group selection.

Finally, we discuss how genes can adapt to culture: culture-gene coevolution and how this process may have led to the rapid expansion of the human brain.

The When and Who of Social Learning and Conformist Transmission

Tom Morgan, Joe Henrich and I recently published a paper on the “The When and Who of Social Learning and Conformist Transmission” in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Conformist transmission is a type of frequency dependent social learning
strategy in which individuals are disproportionately inclined to copy the most common trait in their sample of the population (e.g. individuals have a 90% probability of copying a trait that 60% of people possess). The bias is particularly important, because it tends to homogenize behavior within groups increasing between group differences relative to within group differences.

Our three key findings across two experiments were:

  1. Substantial amounts of conformist transmission. We found substantial reliance on conformist biased social learning, with only 3% and 9% (or 15%) showing no bias in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively.
  2. Increased social learning and stronger conformist bias as the number of options increased. Both the amount of social learning and the strength of conformist biases increased as the number of options increased (i.e. 60% of people wearing black shirts is more persuasive in a world of black, red, blue, yellow, and white shirt colors than in a world of only black shirts and white shirts). These results mean that all prior experiments have underestimated reliance on social learning and the strength of conformist transmission, since all use only 2 options.
  3. IQ predicts both social learning and the strength of the conformist bias. IQ predicts less social learning, but has a U-shaped relationship to the strength of the conformist bias. These results suggest that higher IQ individuals are strategically using social learning (using it less, but with a stronger conformist bias when they choose to use other information).

For a list and discussion of all key findings, see the Discussion section of the paper.

Selected Media Coverage

CBC Radio “The 180” Interview

Global TV News Interview

Fast Company