Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

This study used a diffusion chain paradigm to explore the cultural transmission of causally irrelevant tool actions in chains of adult participants. Each chain witnessed an "expert" adult retrieve a reward from inside a puzzle box using a combination of causally relevant actions and causally irrelevant actions. Which of the actions were causally relevant was evident in two of the chains where a...

Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that individuals differ in their social learning strateg...

Cultural factors have influenced the presentation, diagnoses, and treatment of anxiety disorders in India for several centuries. This review covers the antecedents, prevalence, phenomenology, and treatment modalities of anxiety disorders in the Indian cultural context. It covers the history of the depiction of anxiety in India and the concept of culture in the classification of anxiety disorder...

Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the develop...

Cultural beliefs and attitudes have been identified as significant contributing factors in the development of eating disorders. Rates of these disorders appear to vary among different racial/ethnic and national groups, and they also change across time as cultures evolve. Eating disorders are, in fact, more prevalent within various cultural groups than previously recognized, both within American...

Theoretical work predicts that individuals should strategically increase their reliance on social learning when individual learning would be costly or risky, or when the payoffs for individually-learned behaviors are uncertain. Using a method known to elicit cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory, we investigated the degree of within-group similarity, and between-group variation, in de...