ArticlePNAS nexus2026
The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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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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.
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0 citing papers in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans are uniquely capable of producing highly efficient tools, but the extent to which this capacity depends on individual reasoning abilities remains unclear. In particular, the respective roles of causal and technical reasoning versus cultural transmission in driving technological improvement are the subject of long-standing debate. We address this question by directly manipulating causal and technical reasoning in transmission chains, where participants sequentially inherit and refine prior solutions. Across two transmission chain experiments, participants (
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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.