ArticleScientific reports2016
Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Long-term social memory of mate copying in Drosophila melanogaster is localized in mushroom bodies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Review
- The method of exclusion (still) cannot identify specific mechanisms of cultural inheritance.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Polychotomous traits and evolution under conformity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Does social influence affect COVID-19 vaccination intention among the unvaccinated?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Foraging zebra finches (Biology letters · 2021Article
- Adoption of outgroup norms provides evidence for social transmission in perinatal care practices among rural Namibian women.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2020Article
- Classifying evolutionary forces in language change using neural networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Unknotting the interactive effects of learning processes on cultural evolutionary dynamics.Evolutionary human sciences · 2019Article
- Reply to 'Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission'.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves Are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Chimpanzees prioritise social information over pre-existing behaviours in a group context but not in dyads.Animal cognition · 2018Article
- Dogs (Canis familiaris) stick to what they have learned rather than conform to their conspecifics' behavior.PloS one · 2018Article
- Social learning may lead to population level conformity without individual level frequency bias.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- What are cultural attractors?Biology & philosophy · 2017Article
- Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures.Scientific reports · 2016Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conformist transmission, defined as a disproportionate likelihood to copy the majority, is considered a potent mechanism underlying the emergence and stabilization of cultural diversity. However, ambiguity within and across disciplines remains as to how to identify conformist transmission empirically. In most studies, a population level outcome has been taken as the benchmark to evidence conformist transmission: a sigmoidal relation between individuals' probability to copy the majority and the proportional majority size. Using an individual-based model, we show that, under ecologically plausible conditions, this sigmoidal relation can also be detected without equipping individuals with a conformist bias. Situations in which individuals copy randomly from a fixed subset of demonstrators in the population, or in which they have a preference for one of the possible variants, yield similar sigmoidal patterns as a conformist bias would. Our findings warrant a revisiting of studies that base their conformist transmission conclusions solely on the sigmoidal curve. More generally, our results indicate that population level outcomes interpreted as conformist transmission could potentially be explained by other individual-level strategies, and that more empirical support is needed to prove the existence of an individual-level conformist bias in human and other animals.
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