Intragenerational Cultural Evolution and Ethnocentrism

The Evolution of Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of attitudes and behaviors, typically including in-group favoritism. Empirical evidence suggests that a predisposition to favor in-groups can be easily triggered by even arbitrary group distinctions and that preferential cooperation within groups occurs even when it is individually costly. The authors study the emergence and robustness of ethnocentri...

Evolution of ethnocentrism on undirected and directed Barabási-Albert networks

Using Monte Carlo simulations, we study the evolution of contigent cooperation and ethnocentrism in the one-move game. Interactions and reproduction among computational agents are simulated on undirected and directed BarabásiAlbert (BA) networks. We first replicate the Hammond-Axelrod model of ingroup favoritism on a square lattice and then generalize this model on undirected and directed BA ne...

Cultural commons and cultural evolution

Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the implications of group definition for the coexistence of different cultures. A model of cultural evolution is presented wher...

Cultural Evolution and Memetics

Cultural evolution and personalization

In social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism for cultural evolution. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for the researches in the field. Here we perform statistical analyses on over 100 years of data in the United States. We focus in particular on how the frequency-rank distribution and inequality of baby names change over time. We...