1. To examine the norms and history within a variety of ethnic and minority groups, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, South Asian Americans, Arab Americans, African Americans and African immigrants, Latinos/Chicanos, Native Americans/American Indians, individuals of multiracial descent, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered individuals 2. To review cultural idioms, formal and in...

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of U.S., Canadian-Anglophone, CanadianFrancophone and Mexican managers' attitudes towards upward influence strategies. Generally, it was found that all four groups have similar perspectives in terms of the relative acceptability of various influence strategies. However, examination of absolute ratings of influence behaviors suggests that Canadian-...

Humans spatialize time. This occurs within individual minds and also in larger, shared cultural systems like language. Understanding the origins of space-time mappings requires analyses at multiple levels, from initial individual biases to cultural evolution. Here we present a laboratory experiment that simulates the cultural emergence of space-time mappings. Dyads had to communicate about temp...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents’ consumption behavior. Thereby, the model’s learning dynamics are capable of generating typical Veblenian...

Renowned British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in his seminal work The Emergence of Civilization: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium B.C., provides a theory for the development of complex cultures, which he calls the multiplier effect. According to Renfrew, innovations in one aspect, or subsystem, of culture, such as craft production, enhances and affects, through positive feedb...

In this article, we integrate approaches from biological and cultural anthropology to describe changing relationships between humans and animals in the Dzanga-Ndoki Park and Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic (CAR). Recent decades have seen a rapid proliferation of human activities, with striking tensions between logging and conservation economies. Our data sugge...

Culture is the ongoing oroduct of the evolved osvches of individual humans living in . . . e groups. Progress in our understanding of culture as a phenomenon depends an progress in uncovering the nature of the evolved mechanisms that comprise the human psyche, including but not limited to those responsible for learning. Actual attempts to specify information processing mechanisms that could, in...

1 The article describes the foundations of a new theory of communication as the generative core of cultural systems. We define the concepts of meaning and information in terms of complex systems theory; communication is considered as the interplay of social and cognitive dynamics, i.e., interactions between speakers and receivers, which are determined by social and cognitive rules. The theory i...

In this short paper we describe a robotic setup to study the self-organization of conceptualisation and language. What distinguishes this project from others is that we envision a robot with speci c cognitive capacities, but without resorting to any pre-programmed representations or conceptualisations. The key to this all is self-organization and enculturation. We report preliminary results on ...

translation is an effort toword a global creation of equalizing knowledge and steps into communication amongst nations, thereby creating a cultural relationship. translation reflects a cuttural interdependency amongst nations, iran and russia being amongst them. in this paper, the author tries to show the role of translation in establishing relation between iran and russia by mentioning example...