Limited migration results in kin selective pressure on helping behaviors under a wide range of ecological, demographic and life-history situations. However, such genetically determined altruistic helping can evolve only when migration is not too strong and group size is not too large. Cultural inheritance of helping behaviors may allow altruistic helping to evolve in groups of larger size becau...

BACKGROUND Cultural competency is increasingly recommended in policy and practice to improve end-of-life (EoL) care for minority ethnic groups in multicultural societies. It is imperative to critically analyze this approach to understand its underlying concepts. AIM Our aim was to appraise cultural competency approaches described in the British literature on EoL care and minority ethnic group...

This study examined the hypothesis that differences in the cultural norms of Anglo-Americans and three other ethnic groups—Asian, Hispanic, and Black Americans—will result in different behaviors on a group task. Student subjects were assigned to ethnically diverse or allAnglo groups. Individual and group responses were measured using a Prisoner's Dilemma task in which participants could choose ...

With the emergence of the global marketplace, cross-cultural differences are becoming increasingly recognized as a key factor in the successful adoption of new products (Lee & Harada, 2000). It is thus not surprising that designers have begun to consider the role of culture in design and to develop methods and processes for taking cultural aspects into account when designing new products. Cultu...

Experimental and field research has demonstrated a pervasive tendency toward pairwise conformity among individuals connected by positive social ties, and work using formal models has shown that opinions on connected influence networks should thus converge toward uniformity. Observing that diversity persists even in small scale groups and organizations, we investigate two empirically grounded me...

Cultural boundaries have often been the basis for discrimination, nationalism, religious wars, and genocide. Little is known, however, about how cultural groups form or the evolutionary forces behind group affiliation and ingroup favoritism. Hence, we examine these forces experimentally and show that arbitrary symbolic markers, though initially meaningless, evolve to play a key role in cultural...

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

The present research focuses on cultural variations in the experience of daily stresses and strains. It simultaneously examines the experiences of daily hassles among people holding different cultural orientations (individualistic vs. collectivist) and different socioethnic groups (Jews and Arabs). Data were gathered from 662 Jewish and 300 Arab Israeli respondents by means of a random telephon...

Population geneticists have shown that the effects of local extinction and recolonization on selectively neutral genetic diversity are sensitive to the number of individuals that migrate between groups. Here, we employ a spatially explicit metapopulation model to investigate the extent to which the effects of local extinction on selectively neutral cultural diversity and change are sensitive to...