All day
Much of the human world has been undergoing rapid transformative changes, characterized by the digital technologies, globalization, and the emergence of new information architectures. These in turn have driven changes to the nature of cultural transmission, cooperation, norms, identity, and conflict. Traditional cultural evolutionary models, designed with pre-industrial societies in mind, are not equipped to explain the dynamics of information flow, algorithmic decision-making, and the polarization arising from staggering inequality. This workshop seeks to address these gaps by bringing together leading scholars from cultural evolution, complexity science, and adjacent disciplines. Participants will focus on adapting classic models of cultural evolution to the challenges of the 21st Century, as well as discussing and developing new models that integrate the principles of cultural evolution with the complexities of the modern world, with a special emphasis on cooperation, social learning, and identity signaling. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the workshop aims to produce novel case study models and develop a cohesive framework for understanding the evolution of cultural dynamics in the digital age.