Distributed social learning may occur at many temporal and spatial scales, but it rarely adds up to a stable culture. Cultures vary in stability and diversity (polymorphism), ranging from chaotic or drifting cultures, through cumulative polymorphic cultures, to stable monolithic cultures with high conformity levels. What features can sustain polymorphism, preventing cultures from collapsing int...

This article describes a socially motivated evolutionary algorithm, Cultural Algorithms, to design a controller for a 3D racing game for use in a competitive event held at the 2008 IEEE World Congress. The controller was modeled as a state machine and a set of utility functions were associated with actions performed in each state. Cultural Algorithms are used to optimize these functions. Cultur...

This paper has examined the phenomenon of convergence of per capita out put levels across the IC countries for the 1960-1998 periods. Three concepts of convergence, i.e., sigma beta and relative beta, have been used. The estimated beta values reveals only a very weak convergence (?=.0014) across IC for 1960-1998 period. But when a more homogeneous group of countries were selected, the results s...

Title of Dissertation: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF PERSON CULTURE FIT: CONVERGENCE OF MENTAL MODELS Lin Zhu, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation Directed By: Dr. Meina Liu Department of Communication The person-environment fit hypothesis argues that the match or fit between an individual and the environment predicts positive adaptation outcomes for the person. Unfortunately, the person-environm...

Oliphant [5, 6] contends that language is the only naturally-occurring, learned symbolic communication system, because only humans can accurately observe meaning during the cultural transmission of communication. This paper outlines several objections to Oliphant’s argument. In particular, it is argued that the learning biases necessary to support learned symbolic communication may not be commo...

Starting from Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination, we introduce a rewiring probability, enabling agents to cut the links with their unfriendly neighbors if their cultural similarity is below a tolerance parameter. For low values of tolerance, rewiring promotes the convergence to a frozen monocultural state. However, intermediate tolerance values prevent rewiring once the network is fragme...

This paper presents a conceptual model developed by human-communication researchers that provides a description of human cultural and cognitive processes. The processes are at once useful, informative, quantitative, and compatible with the emerging thermodynamic models of nonequilibrium processes. It uses empirical results of a survey on Korean immigrants in Hawaii to illustrate a mathematica...