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)....

In contrast to individual tasks, a specific social setting is created when two partners work together on a task. How does such a social setting affect memory for task-related information? We addressed this issue in a distributed joint-action paradigm, where two team partners respond to different types of information within the same task. Previous work has shown that joint action in such a task ...

Although mobile learning is a popular topic in current research, it is not well conceptualised. Many researchers rely on under-theorised conceptions of the topic, and those who have tried to refine the ideas involved have found this to be complex and difficult. In this paper, a new interpretation of the concept of ‘mobile learning’ is offered, drawing on the tradition of activity theory. The in...

In interpersonal encounters, individuals often exhibit changes in their own facial expressions in response to emotional expressions of another person. Such changes are often called facial mimicry. While this tendency first appeared to be an automatic tendency of the perceiver to show the same emotional expression as the sender, evidence is now accumulating that situation, person, and relationsh...

Cultural differences between outsourcers and vendor firms in offshore locations pose unique management challenges. One of these challenges is to find a control strategy that fits the cultural setting. However, most of the previous research has analyzed cultural and control issues separately from one another. The objective of this paper is to bring together these two distinct research streams. T...

The demographic and ecological success of our species is frequently attributed to our capacity for cumulative culture. However, it is not yet known how humans combine social and asocial learning to generate effective strategies for learning in a cumulative cultural context. Here we explore how cumulative culture influences the relative merits of various pure and conditional learning strategies,...

Hofstede’s (1984, 2001) work on work-related cultural dimensions has been regarded as a paradigm in the field of cross cultural studies. Specifically, his country classification on five work-related cultural values, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, individualism-collectivism, and Confucian work dynamics, have been frequently cited by researchers in the past few dec...

BACKGROUND When individual judgment conflicts with a group, the individual will often conform his judgment to that of the group. Conformity might arise at an executive level of decision making, or it might arise because the social setting alters the individual's perception of the world. METHODS We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task of mental rotation in the context of peer ...