ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Cultural evolution of conformity and anticonformity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conformity to popular, not average, opinions: Models, data, and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Phenotypic polymorphism via mate copying.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Social dynamics signals in archaeological time-series: How cultural transmission and production biases shape assemblage diversity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Weak individual preferences stabilize culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Social learning with complex contagion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Indirect reciprocity under opinion synchronization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genes, culture, and scientific racism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Signatures of selection with cultural interference.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The evolutionary cost of homophily: Social stratification facilitates stable variant coexistence and increased rates of evolution in host-associated pathogens.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The evolutionary cost of homophily: social stratification facilitates stable variant coexistence and increased rates of evolution in host-associated pathogens.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Coevolution of norm psychology and cooperation through exapted conformity.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Social groups and polarization of aesthetic values from symmetry and complexity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cultural transmission of move choice in chess.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Vulture culture: dietary specialization of an obligate scavenger.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Review
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Conformist bias occurs when the probability of adopting a more common cultural variant in a population exceeds its frequency, and anticonformist bias occurs when the reverse is true. Conformist and anticonformist bias have been widely documented in humans, and conformist bias has also been observed in many nonhuman animals. Boyd and Richerson used models of conformist and anticonformist bias to explain the evolution of large-scale cooperation, and subsequent research has extended these models. We revisit Boyd and Richerson's original analysis and show that, with conformity based on more than three role models, the evolutionary dynamics can be more complex than previously assumed. For example, we show the presence of stable cycles and chaos under strong anticonformity and the presence of new equilibria when both conformity and anticonformity act at different variant frequencies, with and without selection. We also investigate the case of population subdivision with migration and find that the common claim that conformity can maintain between-group differences is not always true. Therefore, the effect of conformity on the evolution of cooperation by group selection may be more complicated than previously stated. Finally, using Feldman and Liberman's modifier approach, we investigate the conditions under which a rare modifier of the extent of conformity or the number of role models can invade a population. Understanding the dynamics of conformist- and anticonformist-biased transmission may have implications for research on human and nonhuman animal behavior, the evolution of cooperation, and frequency-dependent transmission in general.
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