ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Social network architecture and the tempo of cumulative cultural evolution.
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 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Social and spatial drivers of the multitiered structure of zebra finch social networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2025Review
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The contribution of movement to social network structure and spreading dynamics under simple and complex transmission.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Maintaining Transient Diversity Is a General Principle for Improving Collective Problem Solving.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural diffusion dynamics depend on behavioural production rules.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Social information use shapes the coevolution of sociality and virulence.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- The social transmission of stress in animal collectives.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Complex foraging behaviours in wild birds emerge from social learning and recombination of components.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
The ability to build upon previous knowledge-cumulative cultural evolution-is a hallmark of human societies. While cumulative cultural evolution depends on the interaction between social systems, cognition and the environment, there is increasing evidence that cumulative cultural evolution is facilitated by larger and more structured societies. However, such effects may be interlinked with patterns of social wiring, thus the relative importance of social network architecture as an additional factor shaping cumulative cultural evolution remains unclear. By simulating innovation and diffusion of cultural traits in populations with stereotyped social structures, we disentangle the relative contributions of network architecture from those of population size and connectivity. We demonstrate that while more structured networks, such as those found in multilevel societies, can promote the recombination of cultural traits into high-value products, they also hinder spread and make products more likely to go extinct. We find that transmission mechanisms are therefore critical in determining the outcomes of cumulative cultural evolution. Our results highlight the complex interaction between population size, structure and transmission mechanisms, with important implications for future research.
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