ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
On the nature of cultural transmission networks: evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 87 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
87 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Social networks and health: a systematic review of sociocentric network studies in low- and middle-income countries.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2015Pooled it
- Beliefs about Others' Abilities Alter Learning from Observation.Scientific reports · 2017Trial
- Reasoning About Cultural and Genetic Transmission: Developmental and Cross-Cultural Evidence From Peru, Fiji, and the United States on How People Make Inferences About Trait Transmission.Topics in cognitive science · 2015Trial
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- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- Effects of described demonstrator ability on brain and behavior when learning from others.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
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- Core-periphery structure of a medicinal botanical system in Uruguay.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2024Article
- Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
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- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A Simple Model of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The Cultural Evolution of Medical Technologies : A Model of Sequential Treatments in the Medical Setting.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Dynamics of cooperative networks associated with gender among South Indian Tamils.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
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- Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
27 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Unlike other animals, humans are heavily dependent on cumulative bodies of culturally learned information. Selective processes operating on this socially learned information can produce complex, functionally integrated, behavioural repertoires-cultural adaptations. To understand such non-genetic adaptations, evolutionary theorists propose that (i) natural selection has favoured the emergence of psychological biases for learning from those individuals most likely to possess adaptive information, and (ii) when these psychological learning biases operate in populations, over generations, they can generate cultural adaptations. Many laboratory experiments now provide evidence for these psychological biases. Here, we bridge from the laboratory to the field by examining if and how these biases emerge in a small-scale society. Data from three cultural domains-fishing, growing yams and using medicinal plants-show that Fijian villagers (ages 10 and up) are biased to learn from others perceived as more successful/knowledgeable, both within and across domains (prestige effects). We also find biases for sex and age, as well as proximity effects. These selective and centralized oblique transmission networks set up the conditions for adaptive cultural evolution.
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