ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2021
Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- 'A fiction author can do anything, we're bound by the facts': The risks and opportunities of taking advantage of cognitive biases in storytelling for science communication.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2026Article
- Who is perceived to be an expert on COVID-19 vaccines on social media?: Biomedical credentials confer expertise, even among vaccine-hesitant and Conservative observers.Information, communication and society · 2025Article
- Perceived experts are prevalent and influential within an antivaccine community on Twitter.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Article
- Investigating the effects of social information on spite in an online game.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The role and influence of perceived experts in an anti-vaccine misinformation community.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Emergence of knowledge communities and information centralization during the COVID-19 pandemic.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2021Article
- Pseudoexpertise: A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The shortlist effect: nestedness contributions as a tool to explain cultural success.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural transmission biases such as prestige are thought to have been a primary driver in shaping the dynamics of human cultural evolution. However, few empirical studies have measured the importance of prestige relative to other effects, such as content biases present within the information being transmitted. Here, we report the findings of an experimental transmission study designed to compare the simultaneous effects of a model using a high- or low-prestige regional accent with the presence of narrative content containing social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, or counterintuitive information in the form of a creation story. Results from multimodel inference reveal that prestige is a significant factor in determining the salience and recall of information, but that several content biases, specifically social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information, are significantly more influential. Further, we find evidence that reliance on prestige cues may serve as a conditional learning strategy when no content cues are available. Our results demonstrate that content biases serve a vital and underappreciated role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution.
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