Why do fashions come in cycles? How many generations can a legend be remembered for? Can we predict the success of a movie? These are the kind of questions that cultural evolutionists seek to answer. The emerging field of cultural evolution combines models derived from the study of biological evolution with the methods of the behavioural sciences to shed light on the cultural dimension of social life. Culture, in this view, can be analysed as a set of transmitted ideas, norms, and patterns of action. Cognitive science is increasingly being used to help us better understand how this transmission works, and in return, cognitive scientists have gained a better grasp of topics like the nature of social learning or the motivations for cooperation. This class will seek to introduce the bases of cultural evolutionary research as it is practised today, in a oecumenical spirit, covering notions from all the relevant “schools” that are active today in the field (behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, cultural attraction). 

Learning outcomes: The goal is to learn how to engage with contemporary debates in the field of cultural evolution, to understand and apply simple cultural evolutionary models, and to analyse cultural data from experiments, historical sources, or web data.

ECTS: 6

Prerequisites:

- Hands-on sessions require basic mastery of R (executing functions, loading packages, etc.) which can be gained by following the course ‘Producing and using data in cognitive science’, or basic R training on DataCamp, or this: https://www.statmethods.net/r-tutorial/index.html.

Previous attendance of the course ‘Human behavior, cultures, and societies’ is recommended but not required.