ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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
7 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social learning with complex contagion.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
- Latent evolutionary signatures: a general framework for analysing music and cultural evolution.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission of move choice in chess.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- What are patterns of rise and decline?Royal Society open science · 2023Review
- The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Signatures of geography, climate and foliage on given names of baby girls.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The frequency of a cultural trait can influence its tendency to be copied. We develop a maximum-likelihood method to measure such frequency-dependent selection from time series data, and we apply it to baby names and purebred dog preferences over the past century. The form of negative frequency dependence we infer among names explains their diversity patterns, and it replicates across the United States, France, Norway and the Netherlands. We find different growth rates for male versus female names, attributable to different rates of innovation, whereas biblical names enjoy a genuine selective advantage at all frequencies, which explains their predominance among top names. We show how frequency dependence emerges from a host of underlying selective mechanisms, including a preference for novelty that recapitulates boom-bust fads among dog owners. Our analysis of cultural evolution through frequency-dependent selection provides a quantitative account of social pressures to conform or to be different.
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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.