Cultural attractor theory

Cultural attractor theory focuses on how ideas being modified as they are transmitted between humans effects cultural evolution. In cultural attractor theory, a cultural attractor is a "destination" that cultural ideas tend to go towards over time. To say that there is an attractor is just to say that, in a given space of possibilities, transformation probabilities form a certain pattern: they tend to be biased so as to favor transformations in the direction of some specific point, and therefore cluster at and around that point.[1] Cultural attraction theory explains why some representations, practices and artifacts are more prevalent and robustly transmitted than others by looking at the micro-mechanisms involved in their transmission.[2]

A good example of a cultural attractor is language learnability. It has been demonstrated that learners bias the evolution of language towards learnability.[3] This could explain why words can exhibit a high level of macro stability, and why the most frequent and stable words are also the shortest.[4]

The transmission chain method may be used to study cultural attractors.[5]

References
  1. Harms, William (April 1998). "Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, Dan Sperber. Blackwell Publishers, 1996, vii + 175 pages". Economics and Philosophy. 14 (1): 177–184. doi:10.1017/s026626710000506x. ISSN 0266-2671. S2CID 154659909.
  2. Miton, Helena; Claidière, Nicolas; Mercier, Hugo (July 2015). "Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting". Evolution and Human Behavior. 36 (4): 303–312. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.01.003.
  3. Pagel, Mark; Atkinson, Quentin D.; Meade, Andrew (October 2007). "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history". Nature. 449 (7163): 717–720. Bibcode:2007Natur.449..717P. doi:10.1038/nature06176. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 17928860. S2CID 4428703.
  4. Pagel, Mark; Atkinson, Quentin D.; S. Calude, Andreea; Meade, Andrew (2013-05-06). "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (21): 8471–8476. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.8471P. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3666749. PMID 23650390.
  5. Buskell, Andrew (2017-06-01). "What are cultural attractors?". Biology & Philosophy. 32 (3): 377–394. doi:10.1007/s10539-017-9570-6. ISSN 1572-8404. PMC 5491627. PMID 28713188.
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