United Kingdom

This session  showcases the work of African School Of Storytelling (AFRISOS) in collaboration with Indigenous communities in Tanzania, Kenya and Botswana. AFRISOS is a non profit organization dedicated to persevering the traditional knowledge and cultural heritage of communities through visual storytelling (film and video).  This workshop will go into key learnings from AFRISOS on how to best collaborate with communities. 

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

Afrisos, Film making

workshop 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) 
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**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)**

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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:**

Social learning (SL) biases are a fundamental process in culture and its evolution. Many cultures have gender inequality in labour division, which originates from gender differences in adolescents’ school subject choices. Gender conformity remains high in adolescence, and we suggest that adolescents’ educational choices are influenced by a SL bias towards copying the behaviour of own-gender peers. 

The current pre-registered study asked adolescents (159 males, 249 females) to rate their interest in eight educationally aligned projects (e.g., physics) after being told that the previous cohort had a majority that was either their gender or another gender. Additionally, adolescents listed their actual subject choices (subsequently rated for gender typicality) and completed a gender stereotype scale. 

As predicted, interest in a pathway was significantly higher when there was an own- versus other-gender majority (= 2.75, t(3077) = 3.09, p = .002). Interest in own-gender-typical projects positively correlated with own-gender-typicality of actual subject choices (r = .54, P < .001) and, for girls only, an own-gender majority bias correlated with gender stereotype endorsement (p < .05). 

We will discuss how the identification of majority-based SL biases can help our understanding of real-world issues such as gender inequality in educational choices.  


**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @larawooduk

Adolescents’ own-gender majority biased social learning and educational choices

**Abstract:**

Cultural evolutionary theory has shown that social learning is adaptive across a broad range of conditions. However, experiments with humans frequently observe an unexplained underuse of beneficial social information (termed egocentric discounting). One hypothesis for this result is that individuals ignore social information that is likely to be untrustworthy. We tested this hypothesis using a two-player online task, where both players answered the same question in series. Player 2 was given two attempts, making the second after being shown advice from player 1 or their actual answer (spying). We manipulated the payoff structure of the task to have either a cooperative, neutral, or competitive incentive. As predicted, advice was the least honest and social information had the least influence in the competitive condition. Most player 2 participants also favoured spying rather than receiving advice when given the choice. Unexpectedly, a minority of participants favoured receiving advice and exhibited great social influence regardless of the payoff structure. Our results support the hypothesis that human’s may reduce their reliance on social information in contexts where it is more likely to be dishonest or manipulative. 

**Speaker's social media:**



Competitive incentives reduce honesty and social influence 

Selective social learning is thought to play an important role in supporting cumulative culture in humans. Such social learning strategies (SLS) shape how and when observers gather and use information available in their environment. Despite much research exploring how SLSs develop in children, less is known regarding children’s active choice of models. Through a series of experiments, we explore how task (task type, difficulty) and model attributes (age, gender, skill) influence whom children choose to observe and how faithfully they copy what they’ve seen. Children were shown the components involved in construction tasks and then offered a choice of models paired with different types of verbal information about the tasks and the models. Children’s choice of model, justification for that choice, and copying fidelity were recorded. We found that children overwhelmingly chose models most like them in age or gender in most conditions, with some switching to older models, or those of a different gender, when tasks were perceived as more difficult or when the described skill of the model changed. The results provide crucial insight into the motivations shaping children’s active choice of social information, which in turn has direct implications for cultural evolution in humans.

“Because she’s the same as me!” An exploration of children’s model choice in social learning experiments

A short welcome message and introduction made by Rachel Kendall and Alex Masoudi, current CES president. 

CES Presidential Address & Opening Remarks

The talk examines basic and applied research applications of evolutionary approaches to culture. First, studies of social learning among the Aka and other hunter-gatherers are considered. Six dyadic (vertical, remote generation, intrafamilial and extrafamilial oblique and intrafamilial and extrafamilial horizontal) and three group (conformist, concerted and cumulative) modes of transmission are discussed. Aka research on two key features of human cumulative culture, teaching and overimitation, are also briefly presented. Finally, the talk moves beyond basic research and discusses how evolutionary approaches to culture have been useful for understanding efforts to control Ebola (EVD) in central Africa. 

From hunter-gatherer social learning to infectious disease control: Fifty years of utilizing evolutionary approaches to culture

Studying the emergence of rituals in childhood provides insight into the complex dynamics of social group cognition. This talk will examine how children identify and acquire ritual to affiliate with social groups and preliminary work uncovering the relationship between ritual and cooperation in development. Insights within and across populations are drawn from diverse methodologies, including behavioral experiments, multivocal ethnography, and group paradigms. The results illuminate a deep-rooted proclivity towards in-group preference, suggesting rituals as pivotal mechanisms fostering group cohesion. I posit that humans are psychologically prepared to engage in ritual, serving as a means for in-group affiliation and inclusion.

Rituals in childhood: Exploring social group dynamics

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/b3641bdf39f6a6f5c94065c1eccc8184.jpeg)

Conference Opening 

Understanding impact and engagement for the CES Transformation Fund

Introduction & Notices

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/

Afrisos, Film making

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Afrisos, Film making

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Next from Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

Adolescents’ own-gender majority biased social learning and educational choices

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads