Traditional models of how culture spreads were designed to describe early civilizations, typically focused on hunter-gatherers and almost always on pre-industrial societies. Today, a myriad of factors — from the internet to our highly diverse societies to astonishing levels of inequality — shape the way cultural norms are transmitted. The old models of cultural evolution simply don’t describe today’s societies.
To begin building an updated framework of modern-day cultural transmission, representatives from fields including anthropology, sociology, economics, and cognitive science gathered at SFI from May 14–16 for a working group called “Building a Science of Cultural Evolution for the 21st Century.”
“The set of problems in this field is vast,” says SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino, a University of California, Merced, cognitive scientist who organized the event. Workshop participants proposed studying everything from concrete problems, like how fascism spreads, to more abstract ones, like how models can better capture the scale of today’s complex societies.
In some cases, scientists have starting points for this research. For example, the spread of opinions about healthcare, like whether or not to get vaccinated, can be at least partly captured by adapting models of disease transmission. In other areas, researchers are still grasping for a starting point. For example, they have very little understanding of what sparks creativity or of how new ideas arise from recombining old ones.
In this age of plentiful data, it’s tempting to apply artificial intelligence to these problems, and “in the short term, that works amazingly well,” Smaldino says. But AI assumes that the processes dictating cultural evolution remain the same over time, and sometimes that’s a dangerous assumption. “In 2008, when nobody predicted the financial crash, that was partly because the models made assumptions that no longer held,” Smaldino says. Long term, researchers need theoretical models of cultural change that allow for flexibility.
Workshop participants are already planning collaborations for the coming months and years, during which they’ll pool their diverse expertise to develop modern-day models. With these tools, they hope to understand the forces driving cultural transformations seen across the globe.
This workshop was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation.