8 found
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  1.  84
    If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.Alberto Acerbi & Alex Mesoudi - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (4):481-503.
    Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...)
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  2.  47
    Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction.Olivier Morin & Alberto Acerbi - 2017 - Cognition and Emotion 31 (8):1663-1675.
    ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality, and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is (...)
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  3.  23
    From Storytelling to Facebook.Alberto Acerbi - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (2):132-144.
    Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...)
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  4.  41
    Did Einstein Really Say that? Testing Content Versus Context in the Cultural Selection of Quotations.Alberto Acerbi & Jamshid J. Tehrani - 2018 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 18 (3-4):293-311.
    We experimentally investigated the influence of context-based biases, such as prestige and popularity, on the preferences for quotations. Participants were presented with random quotes associated to famous or unknown authors, or with random quotes presented as popular, i.e. chosen by many previous participants, or unpopular. To exclude effects related to the content of the quotations, all participants were subsequently presented with the same quotations, again associated to famous and unknown authors, or presented as popular or unpopular. Overall, our results showed (...)
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  5.  13
    A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media.Alberto Acerbi - 2016 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10.
  6.  25
    Folk-economic beliefs as “evidential fiction”: Putting the economic public discourse back on track.Alberto Acerbi & Pier Luigi Sacco - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e159.
    Folk-economic beliefs may be regarded as “evidential fictions” that exploit the natural tendency of human cognition to organize itself in narrative form. Narrative counter-arguments are likely more effective than logical debunking. The challenge is to convey sound economic reasoning in narratively conspicuous forms – an opportunity for economics to rethink its role and agency in public discourse, in the spirit of its old classics.
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  7.  9
    Joseph Henrich: The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.Alberto Acerbi - 2021 - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 5 (1):91-96.
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  8.  39
    Tim Lewens, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press , 192 pp., $45.00. [REVIEW]Alberto Acerbi - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (1):181-184.
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