ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Human biases limit cumulative innovation.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive appeal promotes the persistence of inefficient solutions and hinders cumulative cultural evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Norms emerge through iterated learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth?Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Exploring new technologies for the future generation: exploration-exploitation trade-off in an intergenerational framework.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Superhuman artificial intelligence can improve human decision-making by increasing novelty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Is technological advancement constrained by biases in human cognition? People in all societies build on discoveries inherited from previous generations, leading to cumulative innovation. However, biases in human learning and memory may influence the process of knowledge transmission, potentially limiting this process. Here, we show that cumulative innovation in a continuous optimization problem is systematically constrained by human biases. In a large (
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Registered trials
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.