ArticleBiology letters2020
Biased transformation erases traditions sustained by conformist transmission.
Article in Biology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 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
- 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
- Norm reinforcement, not conformity or environmental factors, is predicted to sustain cultural variation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Polychotomous traits and evolution under conformity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Culture without copying or selection.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conformist transmission is a cognitively simple decision-making process by which observers are disproportionately likely to follow the majority. It has been studied in multiple species because theory suggests it can create stable cultural variation. However, the current theory assumes that while conformist transmission favours the majority, it is otherwise unbiased and does not systematically transform information, even though such biases are widely documented. Here, we relax this assumption, requiring conformist observers to infer the size of the majority from finite observations of their group mates. Because such inference can be subject to bias, it can lead to the biased transformation of transmitted information. We find that when individuals are biased (even weakly) the capacity of conformist transmission to sustain traditions is reduced and, in many cases, removed entirely. This suggests that the emphasis on conformist transmission as a source of stable cultural variation may be misplaced.
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