ReviewFrontiers in human neuroscience2016
A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media.
Review in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- The cultural ecology of social media.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Cultural integration of invasive species.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Perceived experts are prevalent and influential within an antivaccine community on Twitter.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Formalising prestige bias: Differences between models with first-order and second-order cues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- On the connection between creativity and aesthetics.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Role playing in human evolution: from life to art, and everything in between.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The role and influence of perceived experts in an anti-vaccine misinformation community.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Polio vaccine misinformation on social media: turning point in the fight against polio eradication in Pakistan.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2021Article
- Media exposure and language experience: Examining associations from home observations in Mexican immigrant families in the US.Infant behavior & development · 2021Article
- Cultural Evolution and Digital Media: Diffusion of Fake News About COVID-19 on Twitter.SN computer science · 2021Article
- How evolutionary behavioural sciences can help us understand behaviour in a pandemic.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2020Review
- Transmission of disorder and etiological information: Effects on health knowledge recollection and health-related cognition.PloS one · 2019Article
- Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions remain stable despite delocalization in the digital age.PloS one · 2019Article
- Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the developments of media in the digital age. I will first give a general presentation of the cultural evolution framework, and I will then introduce this more specific research program with two illustrative topics. The first topic concerns how cultural transmission biases, that is, simple heuristics such as "copy prestigious individuals" or "copy the majority," operate in the novel context of digital media. The existence of transmission biases is generally justified with their adaptivity in small-scale societies. How do they operate in an environment where, for example, prestigious individuals possess not-relevant skills, or popularity is explicitly quantified and advertised? The second aspect relates to fidelity of cultural transmission. Digitally-mediated interactions support cheap and immediate high-fidelity transmission, in opposition, for example, to oral traditions. How does this change the content that is more likely to spread? Overall, I suggest the usefulness of a "long view" to our contemporary digital environment, contextualized in cognitive science and cultural evolution theory, and I discuss how this perspective could help us to understand what is genuinely new and what is not.
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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.