United Kingdom

**Abstract:**

Modern Uralic kinship terminologies differ greatly from branch to branch. Finnic languages have become thoroughly Europeanised while the Saami and Samoyedic languages have their own unique patterns. This diversity is a special challenge when reconstructing Proto-Uralic kinship terms to understand the social aspects of past Uralic-speaking populations. Phonological reconstruction has been used in the search of Proto-Uralic kinship terms, but little attention has been paid to the semantic reconstruction. To bring more light on Proto-Uralic kinship we use semantic reconstruction that takes into account the secondary polysemic patterns that have spread areally (Circum-Baltic, Volga-Kama, Western Siberia). We take, e.g. the whole variety of meanings for the word *čečä ‘uncle’ given in different Uralic languages and search for the most logical Proto-Uralic meaning for it. We found that Proto-Uralic had one term for parent’s younger brother (*čečä) and another for parent’s older brother (*ekä). We also found that relative age distinction (RAD), i.e. separation of older and younger relative in the same generation is a Proto-Uralic feature. With the help of this novel approach certain Proto-Uralic structural patterns and features (RAD) can be brought to light, which in turn offer some information about the prehistory of the Proto-Uralic speakers. 


**Speaker&#39;s social media:**

X: @HonkolaTerhi

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

RECORDING - Reconstructing Proto-Uralic kinship

uralic

kinship

semantics

**Abstract:**

Modern Uralic kinship terminologies differ greatly from branch to branch. Finnic languages have become thoroughly Europeanised while the Saami and Samoyedic languages have their own unique patterns. This diversity is a special challenge when reconstructing Proto-Uralic kinship terms to understand the social aspects of past Uralic-speaking populations. Phonological reconstruction has been used in the search of Proto-Uralic kinship terms, but little attention has been paid to the semantic reconstruction. To bring more light on Proto-Uralic kinship we use semantic reconstruction that takes into account the secondary polysemic patterns that have spread areally (Circum-Baltic, Volga-Kama, Western Siberia). We take, e.g. the whole variety of meanings for the word *čečä ‘uncle’ given in different Uralic languages and search for the most logical Proto-Uralic meaning for it. We found that Proto-Uralic had one term for parent’s younger brother (*čečä) and another for parent’s older brother (*ekä). We also found that relative age distinction (RAD), i.e. separation of older and younger relative in the same generation is a Proto-Uralic feature. With the help of this novel approach certain Proto-Uralic structural patterns and features (RAD) can be brought to light, which in turn offer some information about the prehistory of the Proto-Uralic speakers. 


**Speaker's social media:**

X: @HonkolaTerhi

technical paper

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/)**

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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:**

The multi-stage learning model posits that children learn from their parents in infancy and expand their knowledge by learning from peers or from skilled adults, as they reach adulthood. While extant research has focused mostly on direct teaching, children are known to learn through variable types of social interactions, and cultural learning can be seen more as a product of children’s accumulated and lived experiences in their social environment. In particular, hunter-gatherer children learn subsistence skills while joining mothers’ foraging trips from an early age. Thus, children’s social networks during women's subsistence trips may be a nexus for social learning opportunities. To investigate whether women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural learning processes, we present focal-follow data of women’s subsistence trips collected during 230 days in a BaYaka hunter-gatherer community in the Republic of the Congo. Using a stochastic block model for repeat observation data with uneven sampling, we find that, during women's subsistence trips, children co-forage with their peers at high rates, specifically with non-kin peers in middle childhood and adolescence. Our results further suggest that individuals in middle childhood bridge the interactions of those in early childhood and adolescence and, therefore, play a central role in cultural learning. 

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @HaneulJang_kr

RECORDING - Social learning opportunities during women’s subsistence trips among BaYaka foragers

Herbert Simon (1947) observed that human learning and decision making does not strive for optimal solutions but merely ones that are good enough (known as Satisficing). However, the absence of a theory of what precisely counts as good enough has limited the utility of Satisficing in the social and behavioral sciences. We draw insights from recent work in cognitive science that provides a precise criterion for good enough learning (termed the “Tolerance Principle” or TP) which describes how humans form generalizations based on limited or inconsistent information. To date, TP has only been defined for individual learning. Here, we show how TP provides a precise model of how social norms emerge in a paradigmatic coordination game frequently used in research on cultural evolution and collective intelligence - i.e., the Wittgensteinian name game as designed by Centola & Baronchelli (2015). We compare different agent-based models in their ability to predict norm emergence in experimental runs of the name game involving human participants. TP considerably outperforms models which assume that agents leverage optimal rather than good enough predictions for social behavior. We also show how TP provides a more accurate model of tipping point dynamics in the name game. Altogether, we show how social coordination follows the same simple formula for “good enough” solutions as individual learning, providing a novel synthesis of psychological and sociological constructs. 

LIVE - Social satisficing: How a simple cognitive constraint governs norm emergence

**Abstract:**

Kinship terminology is constrained by competing pressures imposed during cultural transmission: kinship systems optimally balance learnability with communicative usefulness. What structural features of kinship terminology evolved to enable this balance? One potential constraint on kinship systems is their lexicon size; fewer terms facilitate learning, more terms facilitate more precise communication. To test whether kinship lexicon size is constrained by evolutionary pressures, we compared the lexicons of 924 kinship systems to randomly permuted baselines. Overall, lexicons are not significantly different than we would expect by chance (z = 0.68): kinship systems have on average 24 terms per 50 relatives compared to 22 in the simulated baselines. However, analysing individual lexicons shows 12% are smaller than chance (e.g. Māori, with 17 terms) and 17% are larger (e.g. Burmese, with 26 terms). To explain why kinship lexicons are more variable than chance, we consider community structure. Languages spoken by larger populations are known to be more communicatively robust, therefore larger populations may have larger, more expressive kinship lexicons. We used phylogenetic comparative methods to explore whether kinship lexicon size co-evolves with community size. Our findings suggest that kinship lexicon size is constrained not by pressures imposed during language evolution, but by cultural change.

**Speaker's social media:**



RECORDING - Evolution of kinship lexicon is not predicted by community structure

**Abstract:**

Children are selective in the social models they choose to learn from, and model familiarity may impact the likelihood of children imitating their actions. Beyond familiarity, a child's emotional connection to a social model may influence the likelihood of learning from them, due to either affiliative motivations, or due to an established history of receiving pedagogical cues from the model. 
In this study, we explored the impact of both familiarity and emotional connection upon children’s overimitation of adult models by manipulating the warm-up experience children received. Children aged between 4- and 12-years-old (N=207, tested in Switzerland) received either a positive or neutral warm-up. In the positive warm-up, the experimenter engaged in conversation with the child while jointly looking at a book and responded positively to any opinions expressed by the child, while in the neutral warm-up, the experimenter left the child to read alone. Children then observed either the same adult or a novel adult demonstrate how to open a puzzle box, incorporating irrelevant actions. Data analysis is ongoing, and preliminary results suggest that neither the valence of the warm-up nor familiarity with the experimenter influenced children’s rates of overimitation, which decreased with age across all conditions. 


**Speaker's social media:**

@rachelaharrison

Does the emotional valence of prior interactions with a demonstrator influence overimitation in children?

Children engage in cultural knowledge exchange by actively sharing what they know with conspecifics– and do so selectively with respect to information type and its recipients. Previous research suggests that from preschool age, children tend to share information that is generalisable to a kind (“dogs have fur”), rather than specific (“this dog has spots”). However, the ontogeny of such generalisability preference and its systematic investigations are lacking. We aimed to probe this question further. 

In two experimental studies, children aged 2 (N = 49) and 6-9 (N = 144) were presented with novel information and then had an opportunity to share it with a naïve learner. We tested if children showed a preference for transmitting generalisable over specific information. In Study 1, such information was presented though action outcomes on novel objects and 2-year-olds did not display the hypothesised preference. In four experiments comprising Study 2, we found that older children selectively shared generalisable facts when those were of neutral nature, as well as health-related, but not when it was in a potentially implicitly threatening context. 

These results advance our understanding of children’s selective sharing of generalisable knowledge by uncovering the limits in early childhood and in certain learning contexts. 

LIVE - Information worth sharing: Do children transmit generalisable or specific information to naïve social partners?

**Abstract:**

Children engage in reciprocal knowledge exchange, demonstrating both their adeptness in learning from others and their proactive role in teaching what they know. The developmental origins of children's teaching and selectivity in information transmission is a recent research area. Here, we present insights from two studies delving into the early manifestations of toddlers' information sharing during the second year of life, observed through video analyses of natural home interactions.
In Study-1, we explored natural interactions of 18-month-old Turkish toddlers (N=43), while the Study-2 focused on American toddlers (N=47) across three time points (13-, 18-, 23-months). Employing a novel behavioural coding scheme, the studies aimed to unravel toddler-initiated interactions and the prevalence of information sharing within these interactions. Study-2 additionally explored toddlers' responses to their parents’ genuine information-seeking attempts. Both studies showed that while toddler-initiated information sharing was observed, it was rare in both contexts. Notably, Study-2 revealed a developmental trajectory, indicating an increased frequency of information-giving events initiated by toddlers, both elicited and non-elicited, from 13 to 23 months. 
In conclusion, our research contributes to the nuanced dynamics of toddler’s early information sharing by focusing on natural observation of everyday behaviours in two different cultures. 


**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @GradGoodfellow

RECORDING - Developmental roots of information sharing

**Abstract:**

Repeated observations that humans do not maximize self interest in behavioral economic games suggest that we have prosocial preferences that motivate how we cooperate. However, because people may import local cultural norms into the game setting, it is hard to know the extent to which these preferences are rooted in an inherently prosocial psychology, or whether they stem from a psychology that promotes adherence to local cultural norms. We designed a study to assess the extent to which individuals’ norm compliance disposition explained their prosocial behavior in economic games. Participants were recruited from college student populations in a norm-loose society, the Netherlands (n=300), and a norm-tight society, Turkey (n=300). Norm compliance disposition in each population was experimentally assessed through a task involving 50 culturally specific norms. We found that norm compliance disposition was a significant predictor of individuals’ prosocial behavior (Dictator game giving, prosocial punishment spending), and not of their antisocial behavior (Destruction game spending, antisocial punishment spending). Our results imply that prosocial behavior is highly sensitive to prevailing norms, and that substantive levels of cooperation can be elicited even without a prosocial psychology—if there are cultural evolutionary processes favoring norms with prosocial content.   

**Speaker's social media:**

@SarahMathew1

RECORDING - Prosocial versus cultural normative underpinnings of cooperative behavior

With commons encompassing approximately 65% of Earth’s surface and vast tracts of the ocean, a critical challenge for sustainability involves establishing effective institutions for governing these common-pool resources (CPR). While examples of successful governance exist, the circumstances and mechanisms behind their development have often faded from historical records and memories. Drawing on ethnographic work, we introduce a generic evolutionary multigroup modelling framework that examines the emergence, stability and temporal dynamics of collective property rights. Our research reveals a fundamental insight: when intergroup conflicts over resources exist, establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ becomes an essential prerequisite for evolving sustainable ‘use rights.’ These access rights, in turn, enable cultural group selection and facilitate the evolution of sustainable use rights through imitating successful groups. Moreover, we identify four crucial aspects within these systems: (1) seizures in CPR systems create individual-level incentives to enforce use and access rights; (2) support for collective property rights is frequency dependent and prone to oscillations; (3) the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is a tipping point that alters the interplay between individual and group-level selection pressures; (4) success-biased social learning (imitation) of out-group members plays a vital role in spreading sustainable institutions and preventing the tragedy of the commons.

LIVE - The cultural evolution of collective property rights for sustainable resource governance

LIVE - Prosocial versus cultural normative underpinnings of cooperative behavior

**Abstract:**

Dominance traits, which capture an individuals’ capacity and drive to acquire and maintain resource holding power, are found in humans as well as our close primate relatives. Power often translates into rank or status. However, the nature of power, status, and rank in contemporary humans is notably different from what is observed in nonhumans. What are the common characteristics of dominant, power-seeking humans? And how does power-seeking adapt over time, particularly in response to relevant life events? Using several large, often longitudinal, human samples mostly from the USA, we demonstrate using correlational analyses including confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling that humans possess a core trait of assertive power-seeking. This trait is generally stable over time and not subject to substantial influence from external factors in one’s life. Perceived social status itself is also highly stable over time. These results have important implications for our conception of what the various traits, motive, and strategies that support status attainment have in common, as well as for our thinking on the temporality of human hierarchies and the traits that support our existence in hierarchies. 

**Speaker's social media:**

bsky: @dremalt.bsky.social ; twitter: @dremalt

RECORDING - Reconstructing Proto-Uralic kinship

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