The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in...

Stephen Stich Rutgers University Abstract: While we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways that appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultu...

There are differences between human groups in social behaviours and the attitudes that underlie them, such as trust. However, the psychological mechanisms that produce and reproduce this variation are not well understood. In particular, it is not clear whether assimilation to the social culture of a group requires lengthy socialization within that group, or can be more rapidly and reversibly ev...

Dialectical interplay between various world views and visions embedded in a socio-cultural system is essential for continual and sustained innovation by such a system. The view that a system must necessarily operate on the basis of a single commonly shared vision is too strong a requirement for systems to sustain innovation. Such a view is based on an analytic conception of socio-cultural syste...

This paper examines a cognitive mechanism that drives perspective-taking and egocentrism in interpersonal communication. Using a conceptual referential communication task, in which participants describe a range of abstract geometric shapes, Experiment 1 shows that perspective-taking and egocentric communication are frequent communication strategies. Experiment 2 tests a selection heuristic acco...

This study is based on an adaptation of the Strategic Démarche Approach applied to the Evandro Chagas Institute of Clinical Research (IPEC) in Brazil, from April to July 2009. The results are related to the experience of the Leishmaniasis Laboratory. A strategic analysis of four homogeneous segments was performed, considering the administration of care and specific teaching and research indicat...

The expert patient: a new approach to chronic disease management for the twenty-first century, produced by the Department of Health, recommends the introduction of 'user-led self management' for chronic diseases to all areas of the NHS by 2007. The premise is that many patients are expert in managing their disease, and this could be used to encourage others to become 'key decision makers in the...

Human language has unusual structural properties that enable open-ended communication. In recent years, researchers have begun to appeal to cultural evolution to explain the emergence of these structural properties. A particularly fruitful approach to this kind of explanation has been the use of laboratory experiments. These typically involve participants learning and interacting using artifici...

Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explor...

Histories of evolutionary thought are dominated by organic evolution. The colossus in our midst that is evolutionary biology casts its shadow over history, making it appear that what is so widespread and important today was always the primary subject of evolutionary speculation. Thus many histories assume that the core meaning of evolution is the change of organic life and that other forms of e...