This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission and socialization. It has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Economics, edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matt Jackson, to be published by Elsevier Science in 2010. We have collaborated on the study of cultural transmission for more than a decade, while socializing our own children....

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...

Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural traits, and we consider the meme as the unit of cultural transmission. We construct an agent-based model representing the processes by which cultural transmission occurs and to link these to the community-scale phenomena arising from agent interactions. We base our model on small communities of e-Puck robots, and following work on m...

A growing body of theoretical and empirical research has examined cultural transmission and adaptive cultural behaviour at the individual, within-group level. However, relatively few studies have tried to examine proximate transmission or test ultimate adaptive hypotheses about behavioural or cultural diversity at a between-societies macro-level. In both the history of anthropology and in prese...