ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Sociality influences cultural complexity.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- Population expansion of early Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers triggered cultural complexity on Paleo-Honshu Island, Japan.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Adversarial Dynamics in Centralized Versus Decentralized Intelligent Systems.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- The neural underpinnings of repeated skill transfer in human cultural evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational Populations.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Effective population size for culturally evolving traits.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Measuring complexity in organisms and organizations.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests a link between a population's size and structure, and the diversity or sophistication of its toolkits or technologies. Addressing these patterns, several evolutionary models predict that both the size and social interconnectedness of populations can contribute to the complexity of its cultural repertoire. Some models also predict that a sudden loss of sociality or of population will result in subsequent losses of useful skills/technologies. Here, we test these predictions with two experiments that permit learners to access either one or five models (teachers). Experiment 1 demonstrates that naive participants who could observe five models, integrate this information and generate increasingly effective skills (using an image editing tool) over 10 laboratory generations, whereas those with access to only one model show no improvement. Experiment 2, which began with a generation of trained experts, shows how learners with access to only one model lose skills (in knot-tying) more rapidly than those with access to five models. In the final generation of both experiments, all participants with access to five models demonstrate superior skills to those with access to only one model. These results support theoretical predictions linking sociality to cumulative cultural evolution.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.