United Kingdom

**Abstract:**

Over the last decade, the global decline of religion has taken center stage (Davies, 2022; Gabbatt; 2023; NPR, 2015). Yet thus far, most of what is known about declining religiosity focuses on the Western world and on wealthy East Asian nations such as Japan. Much less is known about religious trajectories in Southeast Asia, which includes some of the most religious nations in the world (Gallup International Survey, 2017). This study examines religiosity among two cohorts of adolescents growing up in northern Thailand—historically an overwhelmingly Buddhist region (Cassaniti, 2015; McKenzie et al., 2019). In 2012, in-depth interviews were conducted and surveys were administered with 40 Millennial adolescents (Mage = 17.30), evenly divided across rural and urban settings. In 2023, the same data collection techniques were employed with 60 Gen Z adolescents (Mage = 17.47) in the same settings. Chi-squared analysis of religious identification, and analysis of variances of religious practices and religious values, reveal significant religious change over time among Thai adolescents in rural and urban settings. Results will be contextualized alongside rapid cultural and technological change in Thailand from 2012—2023, and implications for youth in other rapidly globalizing nations will be discussed.

**Speaker&#39;s social media:**

Instagram and Facebook: @sadakonooonadesu

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

Buddhist, not Buddhist, sorta Buddhist? Tracking religious change among adolescents in Thailand over a decade

adolescence development

religious practices

globalization

**Abstract:**

Over the last decade, the global decline of religion has taken center stage (Davies, 2022; Gabbatt; 2023; NPR, 2015). Yet thus far, most of what is known about declining religiosity focuses on the Western world and on wealthy East Asian nations such as Japan. Much less is known about religious trajectories in Southeast Asia, which includes some of the most religious nations in the world (Gallup International Survey, 2017). This study examines religiosity among two cohorts of adolescents growing up in northern Thailand—historically an overwhelmingly Buddhist region (Cassaniti, 2015; McKenzie et al., 2019). In 2012, in-depth interviews were conducted and surveys were administered with 40 Millennial adolescents (Mage = 17.30), evenly divided across rural and urban settings. In 2023, the same data collection techniques were employed with 60 Gen Z adolescents (Mage = 17.47) in the same settings. Chi-squared analysis of religious identification, and analysis of variances of religious practices and religious values, reveal significant religious change over time among Thai adolescents in rural and urban settings. Results will be contextualized alongside rapid cultural and technological change in Thailand from 2012—2023, and implications for youth in other rapidly globalizing nations will be discussed.

**Speaker's social media:**

Instagram and Facebook: @sadakonooonadesu

lightning talk

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

**For more information about the CES Conference, please visit the [CES Website Home Page](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/).**

#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity.  We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies.<br>
**[Discover More](https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cultural-evolution/)**

#### CES 2024 [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDJcgi95_jDy7VOEu72wfSR83D5JtHSc/view?usp=sharing)

If you feel at any time you have been the victim of harassment or inappropriate behavior that contradicts our code of conduct, you may use the following form to report the incident. 

**[CES 2024 Code of Conduct Report Form](https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=i9hQcmhLKUW-RNWaLYpvlGWUgzc9C8FMnit5-H2U3oZURUpYRjI5TFM3RUhaRzVDT1o5UEs3M1oxUy4u)**

<br><br>



To access the site please register [**here**](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/registration-information/). 

Registration Is Required

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

**Abstract:**

Existing models of cumulative cultural evolution suggest that cultural complexity is facilitated by high-fidelity cultural transmission and demographic factors, such as population size. However, models and theory tend to neglect the role of asocial learning in the evolution of cumulative culture, unrealistically treating brains as passive receptacles of socially learned information that increase linearly in size and storage capacity as culture accumulates. Here we address this omission by combining artificial neural network simulations and agent-based models to provide a bottom-up mechanistic understanding of the computational capabilities that neural architectures acquire as they increase in size and alter in morphology. Our more realistic model of brain-culture coevolution generates a biologically feasible nonlinear relationship between brain size, neocortical modularity, and cultural cognition, resembling observed neurological differences between human and nonhuman primates. At optimal network modularity and over a critical size threshold, associative learning and inference give way to new capacities for recursive analogy parsing, generation of arbitrary symbolic associations, and an ability to recall and recombine ideas from uncorrelated domains of cultural knowledge without external cues. Including this within existing models of cumulative culture demonstrates that increasing cultural complexity depends upon recursive imagination, transmission fidelity and demography in equal measure.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @AseSergiou

RECORDING - The Role of brain size, neural architecture and recursive imagination in the evolution of cumulative culture

**Abstract:**

 Cultural evolution has been tremendously productive in understanding the evolution of human adaptation, but the role of children learning has been underexplored. Evidence from psychology suggests that children are more exploratory and innovative than adults, which can have profound implications for population-level cultural adaptation. Here we investigate in silico how a life history of innovation and social learning contributes to cultural adaptation, and its implications for the evolution of childhood. We present an agent-based model to answer (1) under what conditions childhood is adaptive and (2) whether childhood can provide a buffer against environmental change, in the context of cumulative cultural evolution and collective problem solving. Using a multi-armed bandit task that allows for incremental improvement in behaviours, we implemented a two-stage strategy for exploring this space – children explore broadly, more likely to learn new behaviours, while adults specialise in behaviours already known, incrementally improving. We found that this two-stage strategy leads to higher payoffs, both individually and collectively. Our model identifies a childhood ‘Goldilocks Zone’ – it allows individuals time to explore before specialising and improving. We implement a variety of environmental change regimes and demographic shifts and find that childhood has differential benefits depending on regime characteristics. 

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @DrElenaMiu

RECORDING - Modelling the role of childhood play as a driver of innovation in cultural evolution 

**Abstract:**

Culture is a complex adaptive system characterized by the interactions of many individuals exchanging numerous cultural traits. The self-organization of cultural traits into systems has recently attracted some attention (Friedkin et al. 2016, Buskell et al. 2019, Yeh et al. 2019), but these models are not capturing all aspects of the complex dynamics of these systems, such as the alternating periods of stability and change exemplified by the change from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system, or the transition to a digital society. In this work, we leverage recent advances in the theory of complex systems (Thurner et al. 2018) to provide new models of the self-organization of cultural systems, stressing the importance of interactions between traits, such as recombination and filtering processes. We study an agent-based model in which individuals carry cultural systems and exchange traits, we show that self-organizing processes active at the individual level influence the culture state at the population level and displays punctuated equilibria, i.e., periods of stability separated by periods of rapid change. In particular, the trait-individual duality that results from this modelling approach criticizes the standard frequency-based selection of cultural traits.

**Speaker's social media:**



LIVE - Self-organization in cultural systems

**Abstract:**

Despite the crucial role of social learning strategies (SLS) in human cultural evolution, their exact nature remains elusive. Traditionally, SLS have been viewed as domain-specific, fixed heuristics.  However, mounting evidence challenges this perspective, suggesting that SLS are more adaptable and influenced by individual experiences. Here, we present a formal and empirical investigation into the role of domain-general reward learning in shaping SLS.
Drawing upon associative learning theory, we propose the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model, which posits that individuals learn to associate social cues with personal rewards. We contrast the SFL model against the traditional heuristic account in four experiments (n = 1300), and consistently find it to provide a superior account of social learning. To establish the scope of the SFL model beyond the experiments, we used agent-based modeling and found that many classic SLS naturally emerge from reward learning mechanisms. 
In summary, this research provides a novel perspective on SLS, emphasizing the central role of reward learning. Our findings address empirical challenges to the traditional account and provide a parsimonious, mechanistic explanation of SLS.  Our account contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving social learning, bridging theory and empirical evidence in the study of cultural evolution.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @B_Lindstroem

LIVE - Social learning strategies are shaped by reward learning

**Abstract:**

Cladistics is a method used in Biology to test phylogenetic hypotheses. In this paper, we aim to explore the application of Cladistics to Archaeology by assuming that particular kinds of characters can be used to organize pottery from archaeological sites in historically meaningful trees. We have analysed several characters associated to painting, temper, rim shapes, and surface treatments and finishes from 15 archaeological sites associated to the Late Holocene Tupiguarani Tradition from São Paulo state, Brazil. We generated a total of 12 trees. Seven trees, related to painting as well as surface treatment and finishes point to a persistent association between two sites from the coast in opposition to inland sites. On the other hand, when only the rim shapes are analyzed, the other five trees do not support a clear separation between the coastal and inland sites. The cladistic approach was useful to build and test hypothesis related to the cultural transmission and ancestor-descendant relation among coastal and inland sites associated to the Tupiguarani Tradition.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @leeh_usp Instagram: @leehibusp

The use of cladistics to explore cultural diversity in Tupiguarani tradition pottery from São Paulo State, Brazil

**Abstract:**

Human cultural evolution relies on the spread of complex social contagions - such as linguistic categories and behavioral norms - that require sustained reinforcement by multiple contacts in a social network. In this work, we propose a novel modeling technique that allows us to take any social network and identify the pathways through which complex contagions are most likely to flow, as well as the network regions (i.e., structural attractors) that complex contagions are most likely to flow toward. This technique identifies the global directional flow dynamics for social contagions in any given network, and thus identifies the core structural backbone for how cultural innovations will rise and spread in a population. We further show how our method allows us to pinpoint which actors and communities in a network are most essential in accelerating the spread of complex contagions, and by consequence, which network regions would be most disruptive to the spread of complex contagions if these network regions were eroded or rewired. To demonstrate, we simulate a range of intervention strategies which show how we can systematically accelerate or halt the spread of complex contagions through targeted network ablations or pruning. Based on these findings, we characterize a class of strategies for controlling and optimizing the spread of complex contagions and thereby processes of cultural evolution. Implications for the origins and future of human cultural evolution are discussed.

**Speaker's social media:**

http://www.linkedin.com/in/fabiantschofenig/

RECORDING - Identifying and manipulating complex paths and attractors in human cultural evolution

Many questions in the cultural evolution of the arts are inherently demographic in scope. Who contributes more to literary change – “old masters” or “young geniuses” (Galenson 2006)? Is literary change mainly driven by the turnover of generations (Moretti 2005; Underwood et al. 2022)? Does literature progress “one funeral at a time”, as Max Planck famously claimed about science (Azoulay et al. 2019)? Using decomposition analysis, a technique borrowed from evolutionary demography, we answer these questions for a large database of fiction authors (140,000 books) published between 1870–1970. Within this corpus, we track the rise and fall of algorithmically generated topics and decompose their temporal trajectories using this technique to measure the relative influence of the arrival of new authors to the literary field, the exit of authors at the end of their career, and changes in the age structure of authors in determining the overall evolution of each topic. While some trends clearly move through the population via social learning, we find that cohort turnover is a key driver of many trends in literary history. These results speak to the essential role for demography in understanding historical processes of cultural change.

RECORDING - Does literature evolve one funeral at a time?

**Abstract:**

The diffusion of innovations drives economic success, social progress, ecological sustainability and public health. Various studies suggest that asymmetric homophilous mixing in metapopulations (i.e., populations composed of groups) can promote the diffusion of innovations. Asymmetric homophilous mixing means interaction partners preferentially come from within one’s own group, depending on each group’s homophily level. Currently, we lack a systematic understanding of how asymmetric group-level homophily affects the diffusion of innovations. To address this, we develop an agent-based model where individuals are members of a minority or majority group, defined by population size. Group-level homophily specifies a random social network that structures social learning. We find that simulated minority subpopulations act as innovation incubators that help diffuse innovations initially, while majority populations serve as reservoirs that protect against regression to non-adaptive behaviors. We formally show that these effects arise from asymmetric-homophilous social network structure. The results suggest that if cultural and socio-psychological barriers are removed that cause individuals to reject innovations based on group membership, then group structure could promote the diffusion of innovations. Analyzing empirical data or designing new experiments with this model will further advance our understanding of when asymmetric homophily promotes (or possibly inhibits) the diffusion of innovations.

**Speaker's social media:**

@MATurnerPhD

LIVE - Group-level homophily in metapopulation social networks can optimize the diffusion of innovations

**Abstract:**

This abstract is for a master’s thesis. Data collection will be completed before September. 

The rice theory of culture hypotheses that wet-rice farming fosters the development of collectivistic cultures. This study aims to determine whether the rice theory of culture can predict between-prefecture variation in the degree of collectivism/individualism in Japan. Utilizing agricultural data in conjunction with self-report data from 4,254 respondents to the Japanese Social Survey (JGSS), I tested whether the proportion of agricultural land set aside for wet-rice farming in each prefecture predicted cross-prefecture variation in collectivism. In a second analysis, this study assessed whether the historical duration for which peoples have been wet-rice farming predicts cross-regional variation in collectivism. In order to answer this question, this study introduced a novel methodology, incorporating archaeological data for the introduction of rice farming to various regions of Japan. As far as the author is aware, this is the first time a study has analyzed whether temporal “dosing” of exposure to rice farming practices predicts cross-regional variation in psychology. Through its use of archaeological and JGSS data, this work tests the rice theory of culture in previously unexplored ways and investigates the origins of regional psychological variation across Japan.


**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @LiamMcClainAnthro

Buddhist, not Buddhist, sorta Buddhist? Tracking religious change among adolescents in Thailand over a decade

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

RECORDING - The Role of brain size, neural architecture and recursive imagination in the evolution of cumulative culture

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Buddhist, not Buddhist, sorta Buddhist? Tracking religious change among adolescents in Thailand over a decade

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

RECORDING - The Role of brain size, neural architecture and recursive imagination in the evolution of cumulative culture

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads