Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

Both Russell and Donnellan proposed direct, non-descriptive cognitive relations between thinkers and objects. They agreed that such relations couldn’t be initiated in evidence cases, but Donnellan, unlike Russell, thought direct cognitive relations could be transmitted from person to person. Kaplan (2012) suggests the issues of initiation and transmission are separable—allowing one to deny that evidence yields direct cognition while believing direct cognition is transmittable. Here, cases involving transmission, evidence, ordinary perception, and perception aided by technology are considered. It (...) is concluded that the same mechanism is at work in each case, and that the initiation issue cannot be separated from the transmission issue since transmission cases are evidence cases. Finally, it is argued that this doesn’t threaten the directness of the cognitive relations involved. (shrink)

Maswood and Rajaram examine the transmission of false memories across small and larger networks. While the spread of false memories is not inherently beneficial, Maswood & Rajaram argued that a better understanding of the formation and propagation of false memories has practical and societal implications. For example, by better understanding how false memories transmit across groups, we might be better equipped to prevent detrimental behaviors that arise as a result of “fake news.”.

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well (...) as in their corresponding public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

Literature on bodily habit has often emphasised the inculcation of new bodily skills and embodied ways of being in practice. However, recent work demonstrates that skilled experts do focus on the body, its sensuous information, and engage in conscious and deliberate forms of bodily awareness during the performance of bodily skills. In this article, I present data from interviews with barbell coaches and yoga teachers in order to explore the social transmission of bodily knowledge. I analyse accounts from (...) these experts about the techniques and approaches they use to teach bodily skills, focusing on objective, subjective, and intersubjective strategies. I argue that while bodily knowledge is difficult to articulate, its fundamentally social basis means that it can be translated through coordinated activities and shaped by social processes. I thus advance literature on bodily knowledge by accounting for deliberation and reflexivity in learning bodily skills. (shrink)

Evolved dispositions influence, but do not determine, how people think about economic problems. The evolutionary cognitive approach offers important insights but underweights the social transmission of ideas as a level of explanation. The need for asocialexplanation for the evolution of economic attitudes is evidenced, for example, by immense variations in folk-economic beliefs over time and across individuals.

Many evolutionary models assume that behaviors are caused directly by genes. An implication is that behavioral uniformity should be found only in groups that are genetically uniform. Yet, the members of human social groups often behave in a uniform fashion, despite the fact that they are genetically diverse. Behavioral uniformity can occur through a variety of psychological mechanisms and social processes, such as imitation, consensus decision making, or the imposition of social norms. We present a series of (...) models in which genes code for social transmission rules, which in turn govern the behaviors that are adopted. Transmission rules can evolve in randomly formed groups that concentrate phenotypic variation at the between-group level, favoring the evolution of altruistic behaviors and other group-advantageous traits. In addition, a direct bias toward adopting altruistic behaviors can evolve. Our models begin to show how group selection can be a strong force in human evolution, despite the absence of extreme genetic variation among groups. (shrink)

From a sociological perspective, Rational Choice Theory neglects an important question: How do agents come to conceptualise choices as they do? In particular, agents not only communicate about their choices and resulting outcomes but also draw attention to options unconsidered by others. This paper presents an agent-based simulation in which different kinds of information about choices are transmitted. This approach also provides a concrete model for certain aspects of hegemonic discourse . In standard Rational Choice where options are common knowledge, (...) all actors with the same preferences should make the same decisions. By contrast if information is transmitted socially, the concerns of a majority may reduce the ability of a minority to choose options appropriate to them even without any exercise of coercion or discrimination. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large‐scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of (...) the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals. (shrink)

In rich detail Jonathan Berkey interprets the social and cultural consequences of Islam's regard for knowledge, showing how education in the Middle Ages played a central part in the religious experience of nearly all Muslims. Focusing on Cairo, which under Mamluk rule was a vital intellectual center with a complex social system, the author describes the transmission of religious knowledge there as a highly personal process, one dependent on the relationships between individual scholars and students. The great (...) variety of institutional structures, he argues, supported educational efforts without ever becoming essential to them. By not being locked into formal channels, religious education was never exclusively for the elite but was open to all. Berkey explores the varying educational opportunities offered to the full run of the Muslim population--including Mamluks, women, and the "common people." Drawing on medieval chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and treatises on education, as well as the deeds of endowment that established many of Cairo's schools, he explains how education drew groups of outsiders into the cultural center and forged a common Muslim cultural identity. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Humans have developed the capacity to approve or disapprove of the behavior of their children and of unrelated individuals. The ability to approve or disapprove transformed social learning into a system of cumulative cultural inheritance, because it increased the reliability of cultural transmission. Moreover, people can transmit their behavioral experiences (regarding what can and cannot be done) to their offspring, thereby avoiding the costs of a laborious, and sometimes dangerous, evaluation of different cultural alternatives. Our thesis is that, (...) during ontogeny, the evaluative communication (approval/disapproval) between parents and offspring is substituted by other evaluative communications among peers, like individuals of the same generation. Each person belongs to a reference social group with individuals that interact more intensively. Humans have developed psychological mechanisms that enable cultural transmission by being receptive to parental advice as well as their reference social group. The selective pressure that promoted these new evaluative interactions arose to facilitate the establishment of efficient cooperative relationships. In short, the social control of behavior is essential to understand human cultural transmission. (shrink)

The dynamics of knowledge transmission and acquisition, or how different aspects of culture are passed from one individual to another and how they are acquired and embodied by individuals, are central to understanding cultural evolution. In small-scale societies, cultural knowledge is largely acquired early in life through observation, imitation, and other forms of social learning embedded in daily experiences. However, little is known about the pathways through which such knowledge is transmitted, especially during middle childhood and adolescence. This (...) study presents new empirical data on cultural knowledge transmission during childhood. Data were collected among the Baka, a forager-farmer society in southeastern Cameroon. We conducted structured interviews with children between 5 and 16 years of age about group composition during subsistence activities. Children’s groups were generally diverse, although children tended to perform subsistence activities primarily without adults and with same-sex companions. Group composition varied from one subsistence activity to another, which suggests that the flow of knowledge might also vary according to the activity performed. Analysis of the social composition of children’s subsistence groups shows that vertical and oblique transmission of subsistence-related knowledge might not be predominant during middle childhood and adolescence. Rather, horizontal transmission appears to be the most common knowledge transmission strategy used by Baka children during middle childhood and adolescence, highlighting the importance of other children in the transmission of knowledge. (shrink)

Social learning and imitation is central to culture in cetaceans. The training technology used with cetaceans facilitates reinforcing imitation of one dolphin's behavior by another; the same technology, now widely used by pet owners, can lead to imitative learning in such unlikely species as dogs and horses. A capacity for imitation, and thus for cultural learning, may exist in many species.

How do we transmit or distribute knowledge, as distinct from generating or producing it? In this book John Greco examines the interpersonal relations and social structures which enable and inhibit the sharing of knowledge within and across epistemic communities. Drawing on resources from moral theory, the philosophy of language, action theory and the cognitive sciences, he considers the role of interpersonal trust in transmitting knowledge, and argues that sharing knowledge involves a kind of shared agency similar to giving a (...) gift or passing a ball. He also explains why transmitting knowledge is easy in some social contexts, such as those involving friendship or caregiving, but impossible in contexts characterized by suspicion and competition rather than by trust and cooperation. His book explores phenomena that have been undertheorized by traditional epistemology, and throws new light on existing problems in social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

We provide a computational model of semantic alignment among communicating agents constrained by social and cognitive pressures. We use our model to analyze the effects of social stratification and a local transmission bottleneck on the coordination of meaning in isolated dyads. The analysis suggests that the traditional approach to learning—understood as inferring prescribed meaning from observations—can be viewed as a special case of semantic alignment, manifesting itself in the behaviour of socially imbalanced dyads put under mild pressure (...) of a local transmission bottleneck. Other parametrizations of the model yield different long-term effects, including lack of convergence or convergence on simple meanings only. (shrink)

Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non‐random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural (...) regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non‐random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts—including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier—there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits. (shrink)

This article takes an intergenerational lens to the study of fathers. It draws on evidence from two economic and social research council-funded intergenerational studies of fathers, one of which focused on four-generation British families and the other which included new migrant (Polish) fathers. The article suggests both patterns of change and continuity in fatherhood across the generations. It demonstrates how cultural forces and material conditions need to combine to facilitate change in fathers? exercise of agency and how social (...) class and the conditions of being a migrant shape fathers? practices. It argues that in seeking to recast the public debate about parenting, it is necessary to penetrate below the discursive level of talk about parenting to examine the habitual nature of many family practices, an endeavour to which an intergenerational approach is well suited. This approach enabled us to tease out the horizontal pull of within-generation influences on fathers, the vertical pull of inheritance from older to younger generations and the material and cultural conditions of fathers? current locations, all of which shape their practices. This analysis also alerted us to changes in conceptual language ? not only from fatherhood to fathering ? but also to the historical resilience of the concept of childcare as reserved largely for the role and practices of mothers. (shrink)

Work on cultural evolution, especially that of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich, has said little about the role of reinforcement in cultural learning. This is surprising, for reinforcement is an old system, it is found across a diverse array of organisms, and it is a successful concept in various scientific disciplines. The main claim of this paper is that social forms of reinforcement play a role in cultural evolution. More specifically, I argue that starting early in human history, social (...) approval and disapproval of behavior function as reinforcers and punishers; approval and disapproval thereby start a process whereby norms are transmitted. After giving arguments for these claims, I discuss work on social learning strategies—cultural rules specifying who to learn from and how to learn from them (Heyes in Philos Trans R Soc 371(1693):1–8, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0369 ). I suggest that the account I develop here can help explain the connection between these learning rules and cultural evolution. I illustrate this point with recent work on divination practices (Hong and Henrich in Hum Nat 32:622–651, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09408-6 ). My account proposes that forms of social reinforcement can explain the spread and persistence of divination practices. Besides addressing the central question (a role for reinforcement in cultural evolution), my account indirectly touches on developing themes in cultural evolution, namely, normative psychology (Heyes in Perspect Psychol Sci, 2023; Birch Biol Philos 36:4, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09777-9 ). (shrink)

Abstract: Pluralistic ignorance is a nasty informational phenomenon widely studied in social psychology and theoretical economics. It revolves around conditions under which it is "legitimate" for everyone to remain ignorant. In formal epistemology there is enough machinery to model and resolve situations in which pluralistic ignorance may arise. Here is a simple first stab at recovering from pluralistic ignorance by means of knowledge transmissibility.

Social knowledge, for the most part, is knowledge through testimony. This essay is an overview of the epistemology of testimony. The essay separates knowledge from justification, characterizes testimony as a source of belief, explains why testimony is a source of knowledge, canvasses arguments for anti-reductionism and for reductionism in the reductionism vs. anti-reductionism debate, addresses counterexamples to knowledge transmission, defends a safe basis account of testimonial knowledge, and turns to social norms as a partial explanation for the (...) reliability of testimony. (shrink)

Culture, defined as shared behavior or information within a community acquired through some form of social learning from conspecifics, is now suggested to act as a second inheritance system. Cultural processes are important in a wide variety of vertebrate species. Birdsong provides a classic example of cultural processes: cultural transmission, where changes in a shared song are learned from surrounding conspecifics, and cultural evolution, where the patterns of songs change through time. This form of cultural transmission of (...) information has features that are different in speed and form from genetic transmission. More recently, culture, vocal traditions and an extreme form of song evolution has been documented in cetaceans. Humpback whale song ‘revolutions’, where the single population-wide shared song type is rapidly replaced by a new, novel song type introduced from a neighbouring population, represents an extraordinary example of ocean basin-wide cultural transmission rivalled in its geographic extent only by humans. In this review, we examine the cultural evolutions and revolutions present in some birdsong and whale song, respectively. By taking a comparative approach to these cultural processes, we review the existing evidence to understand the similarities and differences for their patterns of expression and the underlying drivers, including anthropogenic influences, which may shape them. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the role of innovation vs. production errors in song evolution, the fitness information present in song, and how human-induced changes in population sizes, trajectories and migratory connections facilitating cultural transmission may be driving song revolutions. (shrink)

Almost everyone believes that testimony can transmit knowledge from speaker to hearer. What some philosophers mean by this is ordinary and pedestrian-- they mean only that, in at least some cases, a speaker S knows that p, S testifies that p to a hearer H, and H comes to know that p as a result of believing S's testimony. There is disagreement about how this occurs, but that it does occur is sufficient for the transmission of knowledge in the (...) intended sense. On this understanding of transmission, the natural questions are these: (1) What conditions, in addition to speaker knowledge and speaker testimony, are sufficient for the hearer to gain testimonial knowledge?; and (2) Is speaker knowledge always necessary for testimonial knowledge? That is: Is all testimonial knowledge transmitted knowledge? (shrink)

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evolution of cultural capacities. We demonstrate how a biological market can account for the evolution of teaching when individual learners are the exclusive focus of social learning. We also show how this biological (...) market can affect the dynamics of cumulative culture. The model works best when it is difficult to have access to the observation of the behavior without the help of the actor. However, in contrast to previous non-mathematical hypotheses for the evolution of teaching, we show how teaching evolves, even when innovations are insufficiently opaque and therefore vulnerable to acquisition by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is an important precondition for enhancing individual learning abilities. (shrink)

John Greco (2020) sets out to create a unified virtue-theoretic account of knowledge generation and transmission in his book The Transmission of Knowledge. One of the advantages of his view is that it can defend the achievement view from a known strand of counterexamples. To accomplish that, he relies on joint agency being essential to knowledge transmission. Joint agency can be characterized as a sort of interdependent and interactive cooperation between speaker and hearer that share an intention (...) to transmit knowledge. This paper introduces the phenomenon of unwanted knowledge transmission which shows that joint agency, as Greco presents it, is not essential to knowledge transmission. Four types of unwanted knowledge transmissions will be introduced that pose threats to Greco’s account by showing that shared intention, a key characteristic of joint agency, is not present in all instances of knowledge transmission. Finally, some potential ways to defend Greco’s view will be considered and discussed. (shrink)

Recent research into cultural transmission suggests that humans are disposed to learn, remember, and transmit certain types of information more easily than others, and that any information that is passed between people will be subjected to cognitive selective pressures that alter the content and structure so as to make it maximally transmittable. This paper presents a review of emerging research on content biases in cultural evolution with relevance to the transmission of popular narratives. This is illustrated with content (...) analysis of urban legends, which found that most exploited at least one known content bias, with emotional information and social information being the most frequent. We argue that the narratives do not succeed because of the transmission of adaptively relevant information but because of their exploitation of content biases in human cognition. (shrink)

The new disciplines of experimental psychology and physical chemistry which emerged in late-nineteenth-century Germany were transmitted rapidly to North America, where they flourished. At the time, American higher education was growing fast and undergoing important organizational changes. It was then especially receptive to such European ideas as these new growth points in German science. However, although there were important similarities in the transmission of the two sciences, experimental psychology was changed far more than physical chemistry by the transfer. Physical (...) chemistry was able to fit into a flourishing pattern of German-inspired chemistry in higher education. Psychology was more dependent on its intellectual and social context, and the American context was quite different from that of Germany. (shrink)

have extremely harmful impacts on an individual’s physical, social and mental health throughout their life-span. Recently, it has been reported that maternal ACEs increase the risk of developmental delay in the offspring across generations. This mini review focuses on the direct relationship between maternal ACEs and child developmental delay, and potential mediators/moderators that associate their relationship. Six studies were identified using three search engines. The results indicated that four out of six studies reported at least one significant direct association (...) between maternal ACEs and child development. Additionally, maternal biological, psychological, and social factors were identified as mediators or moderators. In summary, we identified that maternal ACEs increased the risk of developmental delay in children via biological and psychosocial pathways. Future research should examine potential buffering factors and identify when it is crucial to break the intergenerational transmission. (shrink)

This is the first book to address the social organisation of modern yoga practice as a primary focus of investigation and to undertake a comparative analysis to explore why certain styles of yoga have successfully transcended geographical boundaries and endured over time, whilst others have dwindled and failed. Using fresh empirical data of the different ways in which posture practice was disseminated transnationally by Krishnamacharya, Sivananda and their leading disciples, the book provides an original perspective. The author draws upon (...) extensive archival research and numerous fieldwork interviews in India and the UK to consider how the field of yoga we experience today was shaped by historic decisions about how it was transmitted. The book examines the specific ways in which a small group of yogis organised their practices and practitioners to popularise their styles of yoga to mainstream audiences outside of India. It suggests that one of the most overlooked contributions has been that of Sivananda Saraswati (1887-1963) for whom this study finds his early example acted as a cornerstone for the growth of posture practice. Outlining how yoga practice is organised today on the world stage, how leading brands fit into the wider field of modern yoga practice and how historical developments led to a mainstream globalised practice, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Yoga Studies, Religious Studies, Hindu Studies, South Asian History, Sociology and Organisational Studies. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this (...) transformation was the development of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

Three related issues are addressed. First, Hurley treats emulation and imitation as a straightforward dichotomy with emulation emerging first. Recent conceptual analyses and chimpanzee experiments challenge this. Second, other recent chimpanzee experiments reveal high-fidelity social transmission, questioning whether copying fidelity is the brake on cumulative culture. Finally, other cognitive processes such as pretence need to be integrated.

Using samples from three diverse populations, we test evolutionary hypotheses regarding how people reason about the inheritance of various traits. First, we provide a framework for differentiat-ing the outputs of mechanisms that evolved for reasoning about variation within and between biological taxa and culturally evolved ethnic categories from a broader set of beliefs and categories that are the outputs of structured learning mechanisms. Second, we describe the results of a modified “switched-at-birth” vignette study that we administered among children and adults (...) in Puno, Yasawa, and adults in the United States. This protocol permits us to study perceptions of prenatal and social transmission pathways for various traits and to differentiate the latter into vertical versus horizontal cultural influence. These lines of evidence suggest that people use all three mechanisms to reason about the distribution of traits in the population. Participants at all three sites develop expectations that morphological traits are under prenatal influence, and that belief traits are more culturally influenced. On the other hand, each population holds culturally specific beliefs about the degree of social influence on non-morphological traits and about the degree of vertical transmission—with only participants in the United States expecting parents to have much social influence over their children. We reinterpret people's differentiation of trait transmission pathways in light of humans' evolutionary history as a cultural species. (shrink)

The “relational turn” in social research raises many issues that might loosely be collected together under the heading of “reflexivity.” This can have a variety of meanings, but here, follo...

Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years. By Garrett Davidson. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 160. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xii + 333. $150.

This paper advocates for a “social turn" in religious epistemology. Part One reviews some familiar skeptical arguments targeting religious belief (the argument from luck, the argument from peer disagreement, Hume's argument). All these skeptical arguments say that testimonial evidence cannot give religious belief adequate support or grounding, especially in the context of conflicting evidence. Part Two considers some recent work in social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony. Several issues regarding the nature of testimonial evidence are considered, and (...) an account of testimonial evidence as a means of distribution of information through the system is defended. Part Three uses the results of Part Two to reconsider the skeptical arguments in Part One. (shrink)

Ong, Caroline There was once a strong belief amongst global HIV/AIDS organisations that the key to the prevention of the sexual transmission of HIV was condom use. Other measures such as abstinence and being loyal to one partner were seen as beneficial, but secondary. Thirty years later, the evidence is mounting that behavioural change is much more effective in halting the spread of HIV than condoms.

Recent work on the emergence and evolution of human communication has focused on getting novel systems to evolve from scratch in the laboratory. Many of these studies have adopted an interactive construction approach, whereby pairs of participants repeatedly interact with one another to gradually develop their own communication system whilst engaged in some shared task. This paper describes four recent studies that take a different approach, showing how adaptive structure can emerge purely as a result of cultural transmission through (...) single chains of learners. By removing elements of interactive communication and focusing only on the way in which language is repeatedly acquired by learners, we hope to gain a better understanding of how useful structural properties of language could have emerged without being intentionally designed or innovated. (shrink)

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored on the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social expectations account developed by Bicchieri and colleagues. After describing both accounts, we argue that the two approaches are largely compatible, but that the cognitive evolutionary (...) approach is well- suited to encompass much of the social expectations view, whose focus on a narrow range of norms comes at the expense of the breadth the cognitive evolutionary approach can provide. (shrink)

A growing and substantial body of research suggests that female sex workers play a disproportionately large role in the transmission of HIV in many parts of the world, and they are often referred to as core groups by epidemiologists, mathematical modellers, clinicians and policymakers. Male sex workers, by contrast, have received little attention and it is not known whether it is helpful to conceptualize them as a core group. This paper draws upon ethnographic research documenting social and sexual (...) networks in London and looks at the position of five male sex workers within a network comprising 193 men and seven women (as well as 1378 anonymous sexual contacts and 780 commercial contacts). In so doing, it suggests that there is no evidence to show that male sex workers are more or less likely to acquire or transmit HIV in the course of commercial sex compared with other types of sexual relationships. In addition, men engaging in non-commercial sex all reported having unprotected sex in a variety of contexts and relationships and there is no evidence to suggest that men who are not sex workers play less of a role in the transmission of HIV. In short, these data suggest that it would be inappropriate to conceptualize male sex workers as a core group. This is not to suggest that public policy should continue to overlook male sex workers. New and inventive approaches are required to reach out to a vulnerable but diverse group of men, selling sex for a variety of reasons; even if these men are no more vulnerable to acquiring and/or transmitting HIV than other men and women that form part of their network. (shrink)

Pluralistic ignorance is a nasty informational phenomenon studied widely in social psychology and theoretical economics. It revolves around conditions under which it is "legitimate" for everyone to remain ignorant. In formal epistemology there is enough machinery to model and resolve situations in which pluralististic ignorance may arise. Here is a simple …rst stab at recovering from pluralistic ignorance by means of knowledge transmissibility.

This article introduces an agent-based and a system-dynamics model investigating the cultural transmission of frequent collective rituals. It focuses on social function and cognitive attraction as independently affecting transmission. The models focus on the historical context of early Christian meals, where various theoretically inspiring trends in cultural transmission of rituals can be observed. The primary purpose of the article is to contribute to theorizing about cultural transmission of rituals by suggesting a clear operationalization of their (...) social function and cognitive attraction. Furthermore, the article challenges recent trends in the field by providing a theoretically feasible model for how, under certain conditions, cognitive attraction can influence the transmission to a relatively greater extent than social function. In the system dynamics model we reproduce the results of our agent-based model while putting some of our basic operational assumptions under scrutiny. We consider approaching social function and cognitive attraction in isolation as a preliminary but necessary step in the process of creating more complex models of the cultural selection of rituals, where the two aspects will be combined to produce ritual forms with greater correspondence to real-world religious rituals. (shrink)

The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles and a personal view of some promising lines of development suggested by the work summarized here.

Greco argues that knowledge by transmission involves joint agency whose norms are governed by the quality of the social relations in the transmission, and these norms differ from the norms generating knowledge in the source. This approach to the transmission of knowledge allows Greco to respond to three common arguments against the rationality of religious belief on testimony: the argument against belief in miracles, the argument from luck, and the argument from peer disagreement. I agree with (...) Greco’s position on the transmission of knowledge or reasonable belief in these cases and argue that the distinction between first person and third person reasons for belief can strengthen his position. The experience upon which a belief is based can be transferred intersubjectively and strengthens the ground for the belief based on experience, including the belief in miracles. Trust is another first person reason for belief, not only a background condition for reasonable transmission, and it also can be transmitted and is an important component in the formation and preservation of traditions. This feature permits a reply to the arguments from luck and from disagreement with people outside the tradition. But this feature also shows why we find these arguments threatening since we are rationally committed to a minimal degree of trust in all other reasonable persons. (shrink)

Le présent ouvrage rassemble les contributions des chercheurs en anthropologie et en sciences de l'éducation qui se sont réunis en septembre 2015 à la Sorbonne lors du colloque international "Anthropologie et éducation". Sur la base de leurs enquêtes de terrain menées principalement en France et au Brésil, mais aussi en Uruguay, en Iran, en Chine, en Mongolie, en Inde, en Indonésie, au Mali, au Sénégal et en Polynésie, quatre thèmes centraux y sont abordés : l'inculcation de l'écriture et la scolarisation (...) des savoirs confrontées aux modalités corporelles de transmission et d'apprentissage ; la violence physique et symbolique en éducation légitimée comme dressage ou comme épreuve initiatique et maintenant contestée au nom des droits de l'enfant ; l'éducation morale comme intégration sociale et environnementale ; et enfin les pratiques scolaires de reconnaissance des minorités culturelles. (shrink)

The principal contrasts that Jagiello et al. highlight are among many cultural transmission biases we now know of. I suggest they are also reflected more widely in social learning decisions among nonhuman animal cultures governing whether cultural innovations spread, or are instead over-ridden by immigrants' conformity in their new group. Such conformity may serve either informational or social-integrative functions.