DOCSLIB.ORG

Darwinism and Economics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Darwinism and Economics Darwinism and Economics Edited by Geoffrey M. Hodgson Research Professor in Business Studies University of Hertfordshire, UK THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF CRITICAL WRITINGS IN ECONOMICS An Elgar Reference Collection Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction Geoffrey M. Hodgson xi PART I HUMAN NATURE, RATIONALITY AND GROUP SELECTION 1. Herbert A. Simon (1990), 'A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism', Science, 250, December, 1665-8 3 2. Paul A. Samuelson (1993), 'The Economics of Altruism: Altruism as a Problem Involving Group versus Individual Selection in Economics and Biology', American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 83 (2), May, 143-8 7 3.N Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1994), 'Better than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand', American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 84 (2), May, 327-32 13 4. Donald T. Campbell (1994), 'How Individual and Face-to-Face- Group Selection Undermine Firm Selection in Organizational Evolution', in Joel A.C. Baum and Jitendra V. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations, Chapter 2, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 23-38, references 19 5. Ulrich Witt (1999), 'Bioeconomics as Economics from a Darwinian Perspective', Journal of Bioeconomics, 1 (1), 19-34 39 6. Alexander J. Field (2001), 'Prologue: The World's First Prisoner's Dilemma Experiment', in Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1-27, references 55 7. Jack J. Vromen (2001), 'The Human Agent in Evolutionary Economies', in John Laurent and John Nightingale (eds), Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics, Chapter 9, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 184-208 85 8. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath (2001), 'In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small- Scale Societies', American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 91 (2), May, 73-8 110 9. Theodore C. Bergstrom (2002), 'Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (2), Spring, 67-88 116 10. Arthur J. Robson (2002), 'Evolution and Human Nature', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (2), Spring, 89-106 138 Darwinism and Economics 11. Joseph Henrich (2004), 'Cultural Group Selection, Revolutionary Processes and Large-scale Cooperation', Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 53, 3-35 156 12. Viktor J. Vanberg (2004), 'The Rationality Postulate in Economics: Its Ambiguity, its Deficiency and its Evolutionary Alternative', Journal of Economic Methodology, 11 (1), March, 1-29 189 13. Herbert A. Simon (2005), 'Darwinism, Altruism and Economies', in Kurt Dopfer (ed.), The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics, Chapter 4, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 89-104 218 14. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2005), 'Can Self-interest Explain Cooperation?', Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 2 (1), 21-41 234 PART II DARWINISM, LAMARCKISM AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION 15. Joseph Fracchia and R.C. Lewontin (1999), 'Does Culture Evolve?', History and Theory, 38 (4), 52-78 257 16. Dan Sperber (2000), 'An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture', in Robert Aunger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, Chapter 8, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 163-73 284 17. John S. Wilkins (2001), 'The Appearance of Lamarckism in the Evolution of Culture', in John Laurent and John Nightingale (eds), Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics, Chapter 8, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 160-83 295 18. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbj0rn Knudsen (2006), 'Dismantling Lamarckism: Why Descriptions of Socio-economic Evolution as Lamarckian are Misleading', Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 16,343-66 319 PART III GENERALISED DARWINISM 19. John Nightingale (2000), 'Universal Darwinism and Social Research: The Case of Economies', in William A. Barnett, Carl Chiarella, Steve Keen, Robert Marks and Hermann Schnabl (eds), Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution, Chapter 2, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 21-36 345 20. J.W. Stoelhorst (2007), 'The Naturalist View of Universal Darwinism: An Application to the Evolutionary Theory of the Firm', in Geoffrey Hodgson (ed.), The Evolution of Economic Institutions: A Critical Reader, Chapter 13, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 233-51 361 21. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbj0rn Knudsen (2006), 'Why We Need a Generalized Darwinism, and Why Generalized Darwinism is Not Enough', Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 61, 1-19 380 Darwinism and Economics 22. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbj0rn Knudsen (2006), 'The Nature and Units of Social Selection', Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 16,477-89 399 23. Richard Nelson (2006) 'Evolutionary Social Science and Universal Darwinism', Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 16, 491-510 412 24. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbj0rn Knudsen (2008), 'Information, Complexity and Generative Replication', Biology and Philosophy, 23, 47-65 432 Name Index 451.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • JOI Volume 5 Issue 2 Cover and Front Matter
    17441374_5-2.qxd 6/25/09 4:00 PM Page 1 Journal of ISSN 1744-1374 Economics Institutional of Journal Institutional Journal of Economics vol 5 • no 2 • AUGUST 2009 Institutional Economics Contents 137 Knowledge and the theory of institutional change vol 5 • no 2 • AUGUST 2009 Thráinn Eggertsson 151 Comparing theories of institutional change Chris Kingston and Gonzalo Caballero 181 Institutions and US regional development: a study of Massachusetts and Virginia Sukkoo Kim 207 Does institutional quality affect capital mobility? Evidence from developing countries Javed Younas 225 Comparative urban institutions and intertemporal externality: a revisit of the 5 • no 2 AUGUSTvol 2009 Coase conjecture Feng Deng Fragment 251 Self-deceit and self-serving bias: Adam Smith on ‘General Rules’ Elias L. Khalil Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at: journals.cambridge.org/joi Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 28 Sep 2021 at 20:26:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137409001258 17441374_5-2.qxd 6/25/09 4:00 PM Page 2 Journal of Institutional Economics Journal of Institutional Economics editors statement of aims submission of articles subscriptions copying issn Institutions are the stuff of social and institutions and organizations. The Journal of Institutional Economics ( Geoffrey M. Hodgson (Editor-in-Chief) Submission should be made electronically to This journal is registered with the Copyright economic life. The importance of The Journal of Institutional Economics is an 1744-1374) is published three times a year, The Business School the Editor-in-Chief, Geoffrey Hodgson, via Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, understanding the role of institutions in interdisciplinary journal that will be of interest April, August and December.
    [Show full text]
  • “Original Institutional Economics” in the Post-World War II Period and the Perspectives of Today,’ Economic Thought, 7.1, Pp
    Economic Thought 7.1: 63-86, 2018 The Decline of the ‘Original Institutional Economics’ in the Post-World War II Period and the Perspectives of Today1 Arturo Hermann, Italian National Institute of Statistics, Rome, Italy [email protected] Abstract Original, or ‘old’, institutional economics (OIE) – also known as ‘institutionalism’ – played a key role in its early stages; it could be said that it was once the ‘mainstream economics’ of the time. This period ran approximately from the first important contributions of Thorstein Veblen in 1898 to the implementation of the New Deal in the early 1930s, where many institutionalists played a significant role. However, notwithstanding its promising scientific and institutional affirmation, institutional economics underwent a period of marked decline that spanned from the mid-1930s to the late 1980s, when a new season for institutional economics was set in motion. In order to cast some light on this complex issue – without any claim of completeness – we have organised the work as follows: in the first section we consider the main interpretations of this phenomenon. In the subsequent sections we analyse a number of ‘endogenous’ aspects which might have played a significant role in the period of decline: (i) the relations of institutional economics with Keynes’s macroeconomic theory; (ii) the links between theoretical and empirical analysis and the supposed lack of a clear theory; (iii) the interdisciplinary orientation. Keywords: Original institutional economics, social valuation, political economy, interdisciplinarity JEL Codes: B25, B41, B52, E61 1. The Decline of Institutionalism and the Main Existing Interpretations The Ascendance and Decline of Institutionalism Institutional economics originated in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century.
    [Show full text]
  • Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: a Sketch of the Evidence
    BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2016), Page 1 of 68 doi:10.1017/S0140525X1400106X, e30 Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence Peter Richerson Emily K. Newton Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California– Department of Psychology, Dominican University of California, San Rafael, CA Davis, Davis, CA 95616 94901 [email protected] [email protected] http://emilyknewton.weebly.com/ www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/richerson/richerson.htm Nicole Naar Ryan Baldini Department of Anthropology, University of California–Davis, Graduate Group in Ecology, University of California–Davis, Davis, CA 95616 Davis, CA 95616 [email protected] https://sites.google.com/site/ryanbaldini/ [email protected] Adrian V. Bell Lesley Newson Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California– [email protected] http://adrianbell.wordpress.com/ Davis, Davis, CA 95616 [email protected] [email protected] Kathryn Demps https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lesley_Newson/ Department of Anthropology, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725 [email protected] Cody Ross http://sspa.boisestate.edu/anthropology/faculty-and-staff/kathryn- Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 demps/ [email protected] http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xSugEskAAAAJ Karl Frost Graduate Group in Ecology, University of California–Davis, Davis, CA 95616 Paul E. Smaldino [email protected] https://sites.google.com/site/karljosephfrost/ Department of Anthropology, University of California–Davis, Davis, CA 95616 [email protected] http://www.smaldino.com/ Vicken Hillis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California– Timothy M.
    [Show full text]
  • New Institutional Economics: a State-Of-The-Art Review for Economic Sociologists by Rinat Menyashev, Timur Natkhov, Leonid Polishchuk, and Georgiy Syunyaev 12
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne) (Ed.) Periodical Part economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, Volume 13, Number 1-3 economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Provided in Cooperation with: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne Suggested Citation: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne) (Ed.) (2011) : economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, Volume 13, Number 1-3, economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, ISSN 1871-3351, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne, Vol. 13, Iss. 1-3 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/155978 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
    [Show full text]
  • Modeling Homo Socialis: a Reply to Critics Herbert Gintis Santa Fe Institute, USA
    Review of Behavioral Economics, 2015, 2: 211–237 Modeling Homo Socialis: A Reply to Critics Herbert Gintis Santa Fe Institute, USA ABSTRACT The comments on Dirk Helbing and my paper “Homo Socialis: An Analytical Core for Sociological Theory” have provided many insightful suggestions. Several, such as Siegwart Lindenberg’s (2015) proposal to include flexible activation to the core and David Wolpert’s (2015) persona model, I take to be interesting comple- ments to our suggestions. Others, such as Michael Macy’s (2015), include admirable interpretations of our argument. I will here address a subset of issues where commentators have questioned some aspects of our proposal. I thank the commentators for helping me think more carefully about some key issues. 1 The Rational Actor Model The rational actor model treats individuals as having a preference function over payoffs, having access to various actions that affect the probability distribution over these payoffs, and having beliefs concerning the relationship between actions and payoffs. Following Savage (1954), we defined a rational actor as one who exhibits consistent choices (transitivity), whose preference for action A over action B does not depend on other available choices (independence from irrelevant alternatives), and who does not engage in “wishful thinking” (the probabilities assigned to various actions do not depend on the preferences over the payoffs). We observed that a rational actor can be modeled as maximizing a preference function over the set of available choices. We stressed that preferences, payoffs, and beliefs can all be time-, state-, and social-context dependent, and we showed how to treat cases where the stochastic nature of imperfectly measured state variables may lead an individual to make distinct choices under what appear to be identical circumstances, following the constructions of Luce and Suppes (1965) and McFadden (1973).
    [Show full text]
  • Contents Linguistic, and Genetic Data for Inferring African Population History Laura B
    May 11, 2010 u vol. 107 u suppl. 2 u 8897–9022 Cover image: Commonly referred to as the “priest-king,” this Harappan Civilization sculpture (ca. 2000–1900 B.C.) was recovered from the Indus Valley Mohenjo-daro archaeological site in Pakistan. The statue symbolizes the human condition as a representation of bodily form and function, and is an example of culture and the arts. Image copyright J. M. Kenoyer, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan/ Harappa.com. Supplement to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which includes articles from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition. The complete pro- gram is available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/SACKLER_Human_Condition. 8931 Working toward a synthesis of archaeological, Contents linguistic, and genetic data for inferring African population history Laura B. Scheinfeldt, Sameer Soi, and Sarah A. Tishkoff 8939 Uniquely human evolution of sialic acid genetics INTRODUCTION and biology Ajit Varki 8897 In the light of evolution IV: The human condition John C. Avise and Francisco J. Ayala 8947 Bioenergetics, the origins of complexity, and the ascent of man Douglas C. Wallace 8954 Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture among Hispanic/Latino populations COLLOQUIUM PAPERS Katarzyna Bryc, Christopher Velez, Tatiana Karafet, Andres Moreno-Estrada, Andy Reynolds, Adam 8902 Reconstructing human evolution: Achievements, Auton, Michael Hammer, Carlos D. Bustamante, challenges, and opportunities and Harry Ostrer Bernard Wood 8962 Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to 8910 Terrestrial apes and phylogenetic trees UV radiation Juan Luis Arsuaga Nina G.
    [Show full text]
  • Evolutionary Economics - Geoffrey M
    FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMICS - Evolutionary Economics - Geoffrey M. Hodgson EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS Geoffrey M. Hodgson University of Hertfordshire Business School, Hatfield, Hertfordshire Al10 0ab, UK Keywords: Evolution, Economics, Novelty, Innovation, Darwinism, Variation, Selection, Replication, Game Theory. Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Emergence of Evolutionary Economics 3. First Principles and Shared Concerns 4. Different Evolutionary Approaches 5. The Search for General Evolutionary Principles 6. Evolutionary and Mainstream Economics Compared 7. Evolutionary Economics and Evolutionary Game Theory 8. Conclusion: Prospects for Evolutionary Economics Acknowledgements Glossary Bibliography References Biographical Sketch Summary Historically, a number of approaches in economics, including works by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Carl Menger, Alfred Marshall, Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek, have been described as ‘evolutionary’. This is legitimate, because ‘evolutionary’ is a very broad word, loosely denoting concern with transformation, innovation and development. But today the term ‘evolutionary economics’ is more typically associated with a new wave of theorizing signaled by the seminal work of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter in their Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982). Although there is not yet any consensus on core principles, this wave of evolutionary thinking has given rise to a number of policy developments and has proved to be influentialUNESCO in a number of sub-disciplines, – inEOLSS business schools and in institutions concerned with science and innovation policy. Citation and other bibliometric studies show that despite its internal diversity, modern evolutionary economics has created a global network of identifiable interacting researchers. As well as discussing these background issues,SAMPLE this essay turns to theore CHAPTERStical principles and outlines some of the shared common assumptions of this broad approach.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cognitive and Cultural Foundations of Moral Behavior T Benjamin Grant Purzyckia,*, Anne C
    Evolution and Human Behavior 39 (2018) 490–501 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Evolution and Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ens The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior T Benjamin Grant Purzyckia,*, Anne C. Pisora, Coren Apicellab, Quentin Atkinsonc,d, Emma Cohene,f, Joseph Henrichg, Richard McElreatha, Rita A. McNamarah, Ara Norenzayani, Aiyana K. Willarde, Dimitris Xygalatasj a Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany b Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, USA c Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand d Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany e Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK f Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK g Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, USA h School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand i Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada j Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, USA ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and communities' Morality models of what it means to be good and bad and how they correspond to corollary behavior across a variety of Cross-cultural ethnography socioecological contexts. Our sample includes over 600 people from eight different field sites that include for- Cognitive anthropology agers, horticulturalists, herders, and the fully market-reliant. We first examine the universals and particulars of Evolution of cooperation explicit moral models. We then use these moral models to assess their role in the outcome of an economic experiment designed to detect systematic, dishonest rule-breaking favoritism.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology
    Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (2019) 477–492 brill.com/jocc Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology Ryan Nichols Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton, United States [email protected] Henrike Moll Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States [email protected] Jacob L. Mackey Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Occidental College, Los Angeles, United States [email protected] Abstract This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes ar- ticulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technolo- gies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evo- lution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjec- tivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and au- tistic in character. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15685373-12340070 478 Nichols, Moll and Mackey Keywords cultural evolution – evolutionary psychology – cognitive psychology – joint attention – Cecilia Heyes In Cecilia Heyes’ new book, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Heyes, 2018), she describes herself as founding a new approach to the study of human cognition and its emergence.
    [Show full text]
  • Preferences Under Pressure
    Eric Skoog Preferences Under Pressure Conflict, Threat Cues and Willingness to Compromise Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Zootissalen, EBC, Villavägen 9, Uppsala, Friday, 13 March 2020 at 10:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Associate Professor Thomas Zeitzoff (American University, School of Public Affairs). Abstract Skoog, E. 2020. Preferences Under Pressure. Conflict, Threat Cues and Willingness to Compromise. Report / Department of Peace and Conflict Research 121. 66 pp. Uppsala: Department of Peace and Conflict Research. ISBN 978-91-506-2805-0. Understanding how preferences are formed is a key question in the social sciences. The ability of agents to interact with each other is a prerequisite for well-functioning societies. Nevertheless, the process whereby the preferences of agents in conflict are formed have often been black boxed, and the literature on the effects of armed conflict on individuals reveals a great variation in terms of outcomes. Sometimes, individuals are willing to cooperate and interact even with former enemies, while sometimes, we see outright refusal to cooperate or interact at all. In this dissertation, I look at the role of threat in driving some of these divergent results. Armed conflict is rife with physical threats to life, limb and property, and there has been much research pointing to the impact of threat on preferences, attitudes and behavior. Research in the field of evolutionary psychology has revealed that threat is not a singular category, but a nuanced phenomenon, where different types of threat may lead to different responses.
    [Show full text]
  • Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems
    UC Riverside Cliodynamics Title Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/981121t8 Journal Cliodynamics, 3(1) Authors Richerson, Peter Henrich, Joe Publication Date 2012 DOI 10.21237/C7clio3112453 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cliodynamics: the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems Peter Richerson University of California-Davis Joseph Henrich University of British Columbia Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises from culturally transmitted ideas, values and skills that underpin the operation of social norms and institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of social norms and institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and gene- culture coevolution in early human populations during Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in small-scale societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior across populations, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Science Studies and Experiments with Web Applications
    Social Science Studies and Experiments with Web Applications Author Dawit Bezu Mengistu Supervisor Aris Alissandrakis Exam date 30 August 2018 Subject Social Media and Web Technologies Level Master Course code 5ME11E-VT18 Abstract This thesis explores a web-based method to do studies in cultural evolution. Cu- mulative cultural evolution (CCE) is defined as social learning that allows for the accumulation of changes over time where successful modifications are maintained un- til additional change is introduced. In the past few decades, many interdisciplinary studies were conducted on cultural evolution. However, until recently most of those studies were limited to lab experiments. This thesis aims to address the limitations of the experimental methods by replicating a lab-based experiment online. A web-based application was developed and used for replicating an experiment on conformity by Solomon Asch[1951]. The developed application engages participants in an optical illusion test within different groups of social influence. The major finding of the study reveals that conformity increases on trials with higher social influence. In addition, it was also found that when the task becomes more difficult, the subject's conformity increases. These findings were also reported in the original experiment. The results of the study showed that lab-based experiments in cultural evolution studies can be replicated over the web with quantitatively similar results. Keywords| Cumulative Cultural Evolution, web-based experiment, optical illusion, real-time communication 1 Dedication To Simon & Yohana 2 Acknowledgements I want to thank the Swedish Institute (SI) for granting me a scholarship. I would like to express my great appreciation to my supervisor Dr.
    [Show full text]