Denmark

 I study the impact of exposure to large adverse shocks on people&#39;s normative beliefs. Combining data on the occurrences of conflicts, epidemics, and other natural disasters with large-scale survey data covering hundreds of normative beliefs, I make four findings. First, individuals surveyed in the weeks after a shock hits in their vicinity shift their normative beliefs closer to the local modal beliefs, place more importance on norm adherence, and exhibit a greater willingness to sanction norm deviations. Second, the effect is found for normative beliefs across many domains, pointing to a psychological mechanism rather than a strategic response to shocks. Third, shocks can lead to belief polarization if the local modal beliefs differ across groups before a shock hits. Fourth, examining within-country variation in shocks experienced during early lifetime across cohorts, I find that the effect persists.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Aftershocks: How Wars, Epidemics, and Other Natural Disasters Tighten Social Norms

economics; cultural evolution; wars; epidemics; natural disasters; social norms

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. 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.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

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.

 I study the impact of exposure to large adverse shocks on people's normative beliefs. Combining data on the occurrences of conflicts, epidemics, and other natural disasters with large-scale survey data covering hundreds of normative beliefs, I make four findings. First, individuals surveyed in the weeks after a shock hits in their vicinity shift their normative beliefs closer to the local modal beliefs, place more importance on norm adherence, and exhibit a greater willingness to sanction norm deviations. Second, the effect is found for normative beliefs across many domains, pointing to a psychological mechanism rather than a strategic response to shocks. Third, shocks can lead to belief polarization if the local modal beliefs differ across groups before a shock hits. Fourth, examining within-country variation in shocks experienced during early lifetime across cohorts, I find that the effect persists.

technical paper

 Self-domestication refers to a recent hypothesis about how our species emerged. It claims that the human distinctiveness is, to a large extent, the outcome of an evolutionary process similar to animal domestication. This includes our enhanced social cognition, increased cooperation, and extended social networks, and ultimately, our advanced technology and sophisticated culture. Language is perhaps the most distinctive of human features. In this talk, I will present a model of language evolution under the effects of self-domestication forces. At the basis of this model one can find the idea that self-domestication, through its impact on our behavior, facilitated the creation of the cultural niche that enables the sophistication of language structure and use via a cultural mechanism. Some cognitive changes to which self-domestication might have also aided, like our increased cognitive fluidity, could have also contributed to make human language and human pragmatics more complex. This evolutionary model ties different stages in the evolution of languages with changes in the management of aggression (at the core of the self-domestication hypothesis), with both aspects being engaged in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, as both depend on, and impact on a common neurobiological substrate. The model argues for a strong continuity between human language and the cognitive abilities and behaviors of other species, but it also grants cultural evolution a crucial role in language evolution.

The evolution of language under self-domestication forces: a model

**Author(s):** Williams, K.; Votruba, A.; Neuberg, S.; Saks, M. Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend towards elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. We discuss these findings in light of individual and cultural factors previously shown to influence capital punishment attitudes.

Resource availability shapes endorsement of the death penalty

**Author(s):** Ehret, S; Constantino, S; Vogt, S; Weber, E; Efferson, C Introduction: Social tipping can accelerate behavior change in domains from social justice to climate change. When people vary, however, heterogeneity can undermine tipping in unexpected ways. Methods: We ran two experiments. For both, participants faced incentives to coordinate. After they had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm by incentivizing some participants to change behavior. The first experiment examined polarized identities around the 2020 U.S. elections by using either neutral labels for choices or partisan political images. The second experiment varied both the size of the intervention and the specific individuals targeted by the intervention. Results: The payoff-irrelevant relabeling in the first experiment generated extreme differences. Neutral groups evolved norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. Political groups evolved norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. The second experiment showed that the social gains of behavior change depend on strong interactions between the size and target of the intervention.

Activating cultural change for good (?) in heterogeneous populations

**Author(s):** Adamson, J.; Wilson, E.O. In this paper we explore how hominin behavior responds to the distribution of resources in territorial conflict. We develop an economic model to organize the findings of primatologists, isolating how resource skew and variance affect territorial ranges, as well as how they interact with unequal appropriation abilities. Testing the predictions for humans in a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that observed behavior clusters around the equilibrium predictions and all comparative statics have the predicted sign. We also find that equally strong appropriators choose more exclusive and less overlapping ranges than predicted with symmetric resources, and weaker appropriators choose more engulfed ranges than predicted with skewed resources. (Unpublished Working Paper available online at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4053185)

The Geography of Resources, Conflict, and Territory in Hominins

**Author(s):** White, C. J. M.; Muthukrishna, M. We tested whether sharing socioeconomic status predicts cultural similarity between residents of different nations, such as whether elites share in a “global culture” or whether certain cultural variants are characteristic of low SES. We used the cultural fixation index to examine cultural distance between members of socioeconomic groups living in 88 countries, according to the set of cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors assessed by the World Values Survey (2005 – 2019). Overall, within-country cultural distances between SES-groups (defined by education, income, or self-reported status) were small, and between-country cultural distances were no more similar if people shared the same SES. However, highly educated respondents were consistently more culturally similar to people in the USA. This pattern was not found when SES was defined by income or self-reported status, and education did not predict cultural similarities to other global superpowers (e.g., China or Russia). Results show the global spread of Western values through formal education and imply that cross-cultural studies recruiting college-educated samples are likely to under-represent the world’s cultural variation.

Higher education predicts worldwide cultural similarity to the United States

**Author(s):** Kelly, Daniel; Brownstein, Michael Consistency is an abstract but important social value. We first distinguish logical consistency, the kind of relationship that can hold between sentences or propositions, from that what we’ll call ethical consistency a kind of ideal that people can aspire to in themselves and their social interactions. We’ll then examine the roots of people’s concern for ethical consistency. We distinguish two families of accounts of this concern. The first holds that consistency is a precondition for the realization of different forms of cognitive and moral sophistication. On this “universalist view,” a drive toward consistency is inherent in the nature of cognition, action, and morality. Agents who aspire to be autonomous, self-governing individuals will inevitably endeavor to maintain consistency across actions in different settings, and between their present intentions and future actions. This version of the ideal of consistent even lies near the heart of Kantian moral theory, and exerts influence on contemporary extensions of it. A second view holds that ethical concern for consistency is a culturally evolved value associated with Western individualism, the most extreme versions of which are parochial to WEIRD cultures. This “localist view” sees variability across time and culture in concern for consistency-related virtues like integrity, authenticity, sincerity, etc. as evidence that not all forms of consistency are inscribed in the innate machinery of the human mind, let alone mentality in general. Rather, cultures have evolved different norms to govern individual actions and social interactions, some of which put a premium on values like authenticity, while others prize situational fluidity and the ability to calibrate behavior to different social contexts. After articulating and providing examples of these two views, we evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. We conclude with an argument in favor of the localist view, based on the idea that even in WEIRD cultures that prize it, achieving ethical consistency is a constant struggle rather an automatic result of having a mind, and social pressure and collectively enforced norms are required to maintain it. We end with some reflections on these issues made from a normative ethical perspective rather than an empirical one, situating our discussion with respect to recent normative debates about the value of code-switching and a program of moral education that teaches social fluidity and cultural fit.

The Ethics of Consistency: Authenticity, Code-switching, and the Social Norms of Self-Presentation

**Author(s):** None INTRODUCTION: Scientific debate on the evolutionary function(s) of music has lately intensified with leading theories highlighting its capacity for social bonding & credible signaling. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic provide ideal opportunities for establishing selective pressure on music behavior. This talk synthesizes empirical evidence collected by the global MUSICOVID network to argue that contextually tailored musical innovations may help humans endure societal struggle.
 METHODS: Representative survey data from FR, DE, IN, IT, UK & US (n=5,113) during Apr-May 2020 were subjected to LightGBM modelling to predict socio-emotional coping via music from behavioral changes. A corona-themed music video database (n=465) was crowdsourced. Sentiment was quantified in tweets (n≈16M), subreddits (n≈53K), Spotify playlists (n=10K), YouTube comments (n=125K) & news articles (n≈46K).
 RESULTS: Music aided coping for ~50% of people, being superior to many other strategies. Widespread interest in coronamusic was by far the strongest predictor of successful musical coping, and a functional bifurcation emerged between negative- & positive-experiencers using music for solitary mood regulation and as a proxy for social interaction, respectively.
 CONCLUSIONS: These data provocatively suggest that topical music may have been adaptive in building resilience during human evolution.

Topical musical innovations may have helped humans endure societal struggle during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond

**Author(s):** Brooks, RC, Blake, KR, Fromhage, L Resources influence the formation and success of human consortships. Resource distribution within a society should, therefore, influence the mating opportunities an individual of given status/wealth experiences. In particular, in societies both contemporary and historic, women prefer mates of higher rather than lower status and wealth, a pattern known as ‘hypergyny’. Within-sex competition is influenced by an interaction between preferences and the distribution of resources. Empirical studies show that economic inequality within a sex can amplify mating competition, and that inequalities between women and men influence mate competition behaviours, but the links between resource distribution and mating competition have received less theoretic attention. We model hypergyny’s effects on mating competition among men and among women within a heterosexual mating market. Lower mating success of poorer men and richer women (compared with richer men and poorer women) is worsened when resource gender gaps are small or when women out-earn men on average. Within-sex inequality amplifies competition. We consider the implications for cultural regulation of inequalities and mating norms.

How gender inequity and income inequality affect mating markets, and how they may shape culture

**Author(s):** Aguirre-Fernández, G; Jett, SC; Carrillo-Briceño, JD., Sánchez-Villagra MR. The blowgun is a tubular weapon from which a projectile (a pellet or dart) is propelled by the force of human breath. In the Americas, blowguns have archaeological records (as iconographic evidence) in Peru and Mexico, dating back to ca. 500 AD. Ethnographically, the use of blowguns has a wide although discontinuous distribution, present in eastern USA and from southern Mexico to areas in the Amazon. The weapon is most widely used and technologically diverse in the tropical forest of the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Particular attributes of the blowguns have been recognized, their distribution and evolution outlined and potential evolutionary pathways have been discussed in meticulous detail in previous papers. For this project, we assembled, updated and homogenised blowgun data for 141 societies in South America from seminal sources; the dataset was then associated with Glottolog data in order to provide comparisons among language groups and plot their geographic distribution. We are currently collecting new primary data from museum collections and integrating a large unpublished archive curated over the last 60 years by SCJ into our dataset. Our ultimate aim is to provide a systematic analysis of blowgun traits (both quantitative and qualitative) in order to test hypotheses on technological innovation and distribution across the world.

Blowguns in time and space

Across the millennia, human groups have evolved specific cultural and psychological adaptations to cope with collective threats, from terrorism to natural disasters to pathogens. In particular, research has identified cultural tightness, characterized by strict social norms and punishments, as one key adaptation that helps groups coordinate to survive collective threats. However, interferences with threat signals that facilitate tightening can lead to cultural mismatches—either too much or not enough tightening. I discuss two examples of cultural mismatches: the COVID-19 pandemic (a case in which collective threat is real, but there is a resistance to tightening) and the rise of populist movements (a case in which exaggerated threat leads to unnecessary tightening).

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