<b>Book Review of <i>Literature as Cultural Ecology</i></b> // Reseña de <i>Literature as Cultural Ecology</i>

Ideology as Cultural Software

Gossip as Cultural Learning

To complement views of gossip as essentially a means of gaining information about individuals, cementing social bonds, and engaging in indirect aggression, the authors propose that gossip serves to help people learn about how to live in their cultural society. Gossip anecdotes communicate rules in narrative form, such as by describing how someone else came to grief by violating social norms. Go...

Surveillance as cultural practice.

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on “surveillance as cultural practice,” which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely t...

Men as cultural ideals: Cultural values moderate gender stereotype content.

Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using different measures, Americans rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas Koreans rated men as more collectivistic than women. ...

Cultural Evolution as Distributed Computation

The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic components of cultural evolution, (2) computationally modeling the algorithmic components, and amassing human solutions to the non-algorithmic (generally, creative) c...