There is growing use of management assessment centres within parts of New South Wales Health. The present study examined outcome benefits from managers who participated in the Australasian Management Competencies Assessment Centre, some 123 staff from one rural and one metropolitan area health service. Results confirmed greater use of personal development plans and increased attendance at conti...

We explore potential conceptual and cultural change in folk-medical models within a Mexican community that may have taken place over the past 30 years. Building on a study from the 1970s, we explore the effects a government-supported biomedical clinic had on the content and distribution of folk-medical concepts. Surprisingly, we find that despite a dramatic increase in access to biomedicine and...

This study examines whether German and Portuguese fiveto six-, and eightto nine-year-old children distinguish between the feelings attributed to a victimizer or to themselves if they were the victimizers in two hypothetical moral violations (stealing and breaking a promise), and how they morally evaluate the emotions they attribute to victimizers and the person of the victimizer. The results sh...

Various researchers (i.e., Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand,1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) have suggested that the cultural variables of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism correspond to Fiske’s (1991, 1992) relational models of collectivism, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. In this study, we tested this claim in a cross-cultural comparison betw...

Here we present an analytical technique for the measurement and evaluation of changes in chronologically sequenced assemblages. To illustrate the method, we studied the cultural evolution of European cooking as revealed in seven cook books dispersed over the past 800 years. We investigated if changes in the set of commonly used ingredients were mainly gradual or subject to fashion fluctuations....

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 2...

Theoretical work predicts that individuals should strategically increase their reliance on social learning when individual learning would be costly or risky, or when the payoffs for individually-learned behaviors are uncertain. Using a method known to elicit cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory, we investigated the degree of within-group similarity, and between-group variation, in de...

The 1980s witnessed an increased interest among behavior analysts regarding a paradigm in cultural anthropology known as cultural materialism. This perspective suggests that all behavior ultimately rests on the relationship between the natural environment and the methods used to obtain resources needed to maintain survival and a high standard of living, known as the mode of production. While us...

Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive ev...

This paper argues that the economics of the family can be much enriched by incorporating recent developments in evolutionary biology, animal behavior studies, cultural evolution, anthropology, and game theory. Evolutionary foundations of sympathy between relatives are explored. Applications of the theory of cultural evolution to the demographic transition and to wealth transfers between generat...