ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2020
Open-ended cumulative cultural evolution of Hollywood film crews.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Are there large-scale trends in art history that surpass individual creativity or relatively short artistic movements? Many theories describe art history as a process similar to a change of fashions, while others suggest that art can be progressive - getting better, in some sense, over time. We approach this question anew with the theory of cumulative cultural evolution, which describes cultural accomplishments in terms of innovations that are maintained across generations and accumulated to support ever greater creative potential. In this paper, we empirically test the possibility for cumulative evolution in the techniques used to make an artistic product. Specifically, we measure the size and structure of the production crews in American films in 1910-2010 based on a dataset of 1000 popular films across the century. We find that film crews become exponentially more complex, with a growing set of core jobs, and more innovative in creating new jobs in filmmaking. Our study shows that art history can be cumulative, showing the progressive maintenance of innovative techniques, and thus providing an alternative to the widespread view of art history as a mere fluctuation of trends and fashions.
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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.