ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Beyond social learning.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Traditionalism mediates social learning: Biases in acceptance of novel health interventions among Himba pastoralists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study.iScience · 2025Article
- Bumblebee social learning outcomes correlate with their flower-facing behaviour.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Foundations of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Social information use and social information waste.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 10 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural evolution requires the social transmission of information. For this reason, scholars have emphasized social learning when explaining how and why culture evolves. Yet cultural evolution results from many mechanisms operating in concert. Here, we argue that the emphasis on social learning has distracted scholars from appreciating both the full range of mechanisms contributing to cultural evolution and how interactions among those mechanisms and other factors affect the output of cultural evolution. We examine understudied mechanisms and other factors and call for a more inclusive programme of investigation that probes multiple levels of the organization, spanning the neural, cognitive-behavioural and populational levels. To guide our discussion, we focus on factors involved in three core topics of cultural evolution: the emergence of culture, the emergence of cumulative cultural evolution and the design of cultural traits. Studying mechanisms across levels can add explanatory power while revealing gaps and misconceptions in our knowledge. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.