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      What are cultural attractors?

      research-article
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      Publication date (Electronic):
      Journal: Biology & Philosophy
      Publisher: Springer Netherlands
      Keywords: Cultural evolution, Cultural epidemiology, Cultural attractor theory

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          Abstract

          Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.

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          Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case

          Joseph Henrich (2004)
          Article 0 comments Cited 302 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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            Emotional selection in memes: the case of urban legends.

            Chip Heath, Chris Bell, Emily Sternberg (2001)
            This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.
            Article 0 comments Cited 122 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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              Folk biology and the anthropology of science: cognitive universals and cultural particulars.

              S Atran (1998)
              This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These structures are routine products of our "habits of mind," which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent "habits of the world." An experiment illustrates that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a special player, or "core meme," in the selection processes by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort science aims to make more accurate and perfect.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Andrew Buskell:
                ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6939-2848
                abuskell@gmail.com
                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Biol Philos
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Biol Philos
                Title: Biology & Philosophy
                Publisher: Springer Netherlands (Dordrecht )
                ISSN (Print): 0169-3867
                ISSN (Electronic): 1572-8404
                Publication date (Electronic): 17 March 2017
                Publication date PMC-release: 17 March 2017
                Publication date (Print): 2017
                Volume: 32
                Issue: 3
                Pages: 377-394
                Affiliations
                ISNI 0000000121885934, GRID grid.5335.0, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, , University of Cambridge, ; Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6939-2848
                Article
                Publisher ID: 9570
                DOI: 10.1007/s10539-017-9570-6
                PMC ID: 5491627
                PubMed ID: 28713188
                SO-VID: 0af9aff4-c372-4fd8-8596-bc82c658bd8c
                Copyright © © The Author(s) 2017
                License:

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                Date received : 1 August 2016
                Date accepted : 13 March 2017
                Funding
                Funded by: European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (BE)
                Award ID: FP7/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement No. 284123.
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Subject: Article
                Custom metadata
                issue-copyright-statement © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

                ScienceOpen disciplines: Philosophy of science
                Keywords: cultural evolution,cultural epidemiology,cultural attractor theory
                Data availability:
                ScienceOpen disciplines: Philosophy of science
                Keywords: cultural evolution, cultural epidemiology, cultural attractor theory

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