ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 85 papers.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The case against efficiency: friction in social media.Npj complexity · 2026Review
- Towards a theory of human creativity sustained by embodied collective intelligence.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Higher-order interactions shape collective human behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- The archaeology of climate change: a blueprint for integrating environmental and cultural systems.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Female friendship and the cultural transmission of low-fertility values: Evidence from rural Poland.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Multivariate analyses of Aurignacian and Gravettian personal ornaments support cultural continuity in the Early Upper Palaeolithic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Copy or collaborate? How networks impact collective problem solving.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Social learning preserves both useful and useless theories by canalizing learners' exploration.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Oxytocin homogenizes horse group organization.iScience · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Complex technologies used in most human societies are beyond the inventive capacities of individuals. Instead, they result from a cumulative process in which innovations are gradually added to existing cultural traits across many generations. Recent work suggests that a population's ability to develop complex technologies is positively affected by its size and connectedness. Here, we present a simple computer-based experiment that compares the accumulation of innovations by fully and partially connected groups of the same size in a complex fitness landscape. We find that the propensity to learn from successful individuals drastically reduces cultural diversity within fully connected groups. In comparison, partially connected groups produce more diverse solutions, and this diversity allows them to develop complex solutions that are never produced in fully connected groups. These results suggest that explanations of ancestral patterns of cultural complexity may need to consider levels of population fragmentation and interaction patterns between partially isolated groups.
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