Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals

Long-term studies of social animals provide detailed data on individual attributes, behaviors, and associations that enable us to explore cultural diffusion in networks. In this essay, we describe how network science can be used to improve our understanding of cultural and information transmission. After presenting an operational definition of culture, we discuss methodologies and research questions applicable to unweighted, weighted, and dynamic networks. We then highlight relevant studies and methods for both descriptive and predictive analyses that have been used to identify culture and social learning in animal networks. Applying and extending the techniques presented will improve our understanding of information transmission, social learning, and embedded subcultures in the context of human networks.