Research in cultural evolution has focused on the spread of intuitive or minimally counterintuitive beliefs. However, some very counterintuitive beliefs can also spread successfully, at least in some communities-scientific theories being the most prominent example. We suggest that argumentation could be an important factor in the spread of some very counterintuitive beliefs. A first experiment ...

Article history: Received 17 September 2009 Received in revised form 22 April 2010 Accepted 8 June 2010

Quality in its contemporary incarnation is commonly referred to as organizational excellence, enterprise excellence, business excellence, or performance excellence. While technology may serve as a key enabler of enterprise excellence, enterprise excellence itself is in large enabled by the human dimension both in terms of ideation and effort. The human dimension manifests in many ways, with peo...

The target article argues that whole groups can act as interactors in an evolutionary process. We believe that Smaldino's discussion would be advanced by a more thorough analysis of the appropriate replicators and lineages for this model. We show that cultural evolution is necessarily a separate process from cultural group selection, and we also illustrate that the two processes may influence e...

A cultural-psychological analysis emphasizes the intentionality of everyday worlds: the idea that material products not only bear psychological traces of culturally constituted beliefs and desires, but also subsequently afford and promote culturally consistent understandings and actions. We applied this conceptual framework of mutual constitution in a research project using quantitative and qua...

In the modern era where highly-commodified cultural products compete heavily for mass consumption, finding the principles behind the complex process of how successful, “hit” products emerge remains a vital scientific goal that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Here we present a framework for tracing the cycle of prosperity-and-decline of a product to find insights into influential and pot...

From decades, surplus milk is being converted to a series of indigenous milk products to preserve nutritional goodness of milk and to enhance shelf-life at prevalent high temperature environmental conditions. Milk based sweets are an integral part of the socio-cultural life of Indians and being consumed at different social events and religious occasions (Barnwal and Sen, 2014). It is estimated ...