There has been relatively little research on the psychological mechanisms of social learning. This may be due, in part, to the practice of distinguishing categories of social learning in relation to ill-defined mechanisms (Davis, 1973; Galef, 1988). This practice both makes it difficult to identify empirically examples of different types of social learning, and gives the false impression that t...

With the recent explosion of popularity of commercial social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, the size of social networks that can be studied scientifically has passed from the scale traditionally studied by sociologists and anthropologists to the scale of networks more typically studied by computer scientists. In this chapter, I will highlight a recent line of computational research...

Studies of culturally-based phenomena within neuroscientifi c frameworks represent one of the most dynamic tendencies in contemporary cognitive science. They have provided the foundations of social neuroscience, which comprise studies on brain correlates of social cognition, abilities , and disabilities (Cacioppo, 2002), and have contributed to the consolidation of evolutionary neuroscience as ...

We estimate Gowers uniformity norms for some classical automatic sequences, such as the Thue-Morse and Rudin-Shapiro sequences. The methods are quite robust and can be extended to a broader class of sequences. As an application, we asymptotically count arithmetic progressions of a given length in the set of integers ≤ N where the Thue-Morse (resp. RudinShapiro) sequence takes the value +1.

In a recent series of articles, Hislope (1998, 2000) and Harvey (2000a, 2000b) have raised questions about the usefulness of “evolutionary theory” especially for any purpose other than identifying “distal” causes of ethnic phenomena. This article responds to those views and argues that evolutionary psychology shows great promise in contributing to the explanation of contemporary ethnic identiti...