Denmark

 The human propensity to detect agents, not really present around is one of the oldest problems in CESR. But is there any causal connection with uncertainty? In the study, I was inducing via sensory deprivation a specific kind of such experience, i.e., the “Unpleasant Feeling of Sensed Presence” (UFoP), using the predictive processing theory.
UFoP was induced by 0.5h sensory (visual, auditory) deprivation trial, manipulating expectations about the being that could come during the process (using semantic priming), measuring biological data (PPG, EDA), capturing experience via post-deprivation surveys and interviews, and controlling for two psychological dispositions: imaginative suggestibility and fantasy proneness.
The main predictor of UFoP experience was felt uncertainty, moderated by suggestibility (but not by fantasy proneness), while semantic priming had no effect.
In my paper, I will further discuss if – under the condition of greater uncertainty – a) humans generally tend to detect agents due to evolved hyperpriors for the agent-related fear, b) we tend to (falsely) predict the presence of other agents because agents are the main source of uncertainty in our environments.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Sensing spirits and other dangerous beings: how uncertainty makes us feel the unseen presence

agency detection; predictive processing; uncertainty; sensory deprivation; culture-cognition interaction; cognitive and evolutionary science of religion

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/12285eb22580949635121d15d5b46325.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/abstracts.pdf)

**Program-at-glance**

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/c0d0d4c8fcdad49d12631574fd966ae8.png)

### About the conference 
 
**Help-desk:** 
Please first visit [Help-desk](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk) where you can find the instructions and manuals for exploring the conference site. 

**Plenary sessions:**
Five leading researchers give a live talk. It is like a TV show. The audience can submit a question from the chat window. Chat messages are immediately delivered to speakers and moderators.

**Q&A sessions (parallel):**
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Further Gather Town instruction and how to use short keys please find in our [Help desk page](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk). 

**Videos and slides:**

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### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
**Harassment can occur in-person or virtually, and includes, but is not limited to:**
* Comments (verbal, text, etc.) that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality
* Sexual images in public spaces (physical or virtual)
* Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
* Harassing photography or recording (including sharing of presentation materials without consent)
* Sustained disruption of talks or other events (including “Zoombombing”)
* Inappropriate physical contact or unwelcome sexual attention
* Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour 

&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

**Honorary Conference Organizer:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home) 

**Chair:** [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io)

**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

Registration fee

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

technical paper

### 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.

Introduction
Many domains of knowledge have grappled with the arrival of hypercompetent artificial intelligence. We might expect an efflorescence of AI-produced ideas. On the other hand, human-trained AI might simply reproduce or reinforce existing orthodoxies. The strategic impact of AlphaGo post-2016 on the game of Go serves as a data-rich case study.
 Methods
Using a large database of top-level human and AI play (62,740 opening sequences, 1956-2020), I study the diversity of opening sequences using multilevel regression models of recent social and individual covariates pre & post-AlphaGo. 
Results
The post-AI era has indeed seen an explosion of move diversity (Shannon entropy on opening sequences), reversing decades of decline. Since the 1990s, social trends have come to strongly predict individual first-move openings (b=3.77, psign<0.001), and, while pre-internet Go was characterized by a low correlation between strategy popularity and efficacy (R2=0.11), the post-AI era now sees a near-perfect correlation (R2=0.87).
 Conclusions
Human Go strategies are more diverse, more social, and apparently more efficacious under the influence of hypercompetent AI advisors.

Strategic Social Leaning in the Era of Hypercompetent Artificial Intelligence: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Case Study using the Game of Go

 I propose a mathematical model of cultural evolution to explain why false theories and meaning systems or maladaptive beliefs may spread and become fixed in a population while assuming that their diffusion rates are lower than their true counterparts. By combining ideas from judgment aggregation and the Condorcet Jury theorem with cultural evolution dynamics, I introduce a new epistemic stage in the cultural evolution process where culturally transmitted theories not only spread “horizontally” (across individuals in the same generation) and “vertically” (from one generation to the next), but also inside individual brains (“personal reflection process”). This occurs when a brain adopts a maladaptive theory (not received from outside) by means of internal inference from other false premise/idea that was indeed received culturally. In this context, false theories may favor the assumption of other false theories after the individuals have been exposed to true information about their logical connection, and increase their presence in the population within the normal and adaptive logical working of our brains. Using a simple stylized model and subsequent simulations I identify the parametric conditions in which false theories become universally accepted, so that the model could be tested empirically.

The evolution of false theories

**Author(s):** Turner, MA; Moya, C; Smaldino, PE; Jones, JH Introduction Social learning is essential to human survival–it is a critical adaptation for dealing with uncertainty. However, uncertainty takes many forms. We identified four theoretically important types of uncertainty: temporal environmental variability, ambiguous payoffs, decision set size, and effective lifespans. We used this framework to study conditions for the evolution of social learning in populations with

Different forms of uncertainty differently affect the evolution of social learning

 This paper will discuss the potential of using methods from digital humanities when studying the evolution of religions. The case at hand will be ongoing work on my doctoral thesis, in which I study separate developments in symbolic systems across the Indo-European religions. Digital methods, such as topic modelling, make it possible for scholars to look for patterns in large textual corpora. Combined with close philological readings, I believe this provides a more nuanced look into the symbolic system, religion, expressed in ancient texts. As an example, I will present my preliminary studies of the different layers of the Vedic Rigveda compared with the Old Iranian Gathas. In this study, digital methods will be an important tool in analysing patterns that unite and differentiate throughout the texts. When comparing the texts, these patterns may lead to not just reconstructions of earlier stages, but how these stages developed into the known religions. Thus, providing a better understanding of the shared Indo-Iranian heritage between the two texts, and the cultural evolutionary processes in the development of the individual symbolic systems expressed. As such, this paper will argue for the advantages of using digital methods when combining Indo-European studies and theories on religious evolution to view similarities, differences, and developments in the symbolic systems of large corpora.

Convenient collaborations: Using digital humanities in the study of the evolution of Indo-European religions

 Two important hypotheses compete to explain the human adaptation. The cognitive niche hypothesis proposes that gene-based evolution in the Pleistocene favored the evolution of information rich encapsulated cognitive modules adapted to the regularities of the Pleistocene environment. The cultural niche hypothesis argues that the hallmark of Pleistocene environments was extreme variability on millennial and submillennial time scales and that culture is an adaptation this. These hypotheses have very different implications for how the human mind/brain would work. Some neurobiologists for some time have argued that the cerebral cortex has to operate as an organ of phenotypic flexibility and that genes specify, in any detail, only the ancient emotional and vegetative parts of the brain. Recent neurobiological advances support this latter picture of cortical function. The ancient but rather generalized appetites and emotions provide the selective forces on the developmental time scale that also act as forces on the cultural evolutionary time scale. These advances tend to support the cultural niche hypothesis and are not consistent with the cognitive niche alternative.

The cognitive niche versus cultural niche hypotheses: The neurobiological evidence

**Author(s):** Chira, A; Kirby, K.; Epperlein, T.; Kuehr, F; Bräuer, J. Introduction: Dogs show an extraordinaire capacity to understand, communicate, and cooperate with us. However, what we know about the social-cognitive skills of dogs comes from observations and experiments performed in WEIRD societies. Around the world though, dogs are kept for various functions, they are perceived and treated differently, suggesting cross-cultural diversity in the strength of dog-human relationships, and perhaps departures from the ‘typical’ suite of skills dogs are thought to possess. Materials & Methods: Here we address these issues by collecting data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. We hypothesize that dog-human relationships will be closer in societies where dog functions require intense cooperation between dogs and humans, i.e., hunting and herding versus guarding, defense, and carry animals. We characterize close dog-human relationships as increased primary caregiving (or positive care), decreased negative treatment, and an increased extent to which dogs are viewed as friends or kin. Results & Discussion: The number of functions dogs perform associates with closer dog-human relationships. Further, the presence of herding (and to a lesser extent, guarding herds, and carry roles) increases the odds of positive care given to dogs, while using dogs for hunting is linked with higher odds of dogs being treated akin to a person. These findings support the idea of cross-cultural variation in dog-human relationships and show how the strength of our bond with dogs can be linked with the function dogs fill in societies. The results are a first step towards challenging the notion that all dogs are the same, and fuel questions about the universality of cognitive and social skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

Beyond WEIRD dogs - Cultural Differences In Dog Human Interactions

 Doctrinal religions have frequently been argued to underpin large-scale cooperation. Throughout their history, they have been accompanied by so-called ‘little traditions’: unorthodox religious practices and beliefs at best ignored by orthodoxy, and at worst derided as backward ‘superstitions’. Doctrine frequently claims that in contrast to orthodox ‘great traditions’, such little traditions are amoral, concerned only with the self-interested pursuit of material aims such as curing disease. This paper draws on historical sources to argue the contrary. Not only do little traditions typically carry moral concerns; they engender forms of moralising supernatural punishment (MSP) distinct from those of great traditions. Great traditions tend to propagate MSP beliefs that encourage contributions toward the extended ingroup of coreligionists. Little traditions tend to propagate beliefs enabling cooperation at a smaller scale. Having surveyed the historical evidence, the paper concludes by sketching a theoretical model of how religious traditions might coevolve by virtue of their ability to support cooperation at complementary scales.

Moralising supernatural punishment and cooperation in 'great' versus 'little' religious traditions: A historical sketch

**Author(s):** Peacey, S; Campbell, O.L.K.; Mace, R Introduction Cultures vary in whether they accuse more men or women of witchcraft (harming others through magic). We investigated why accusations target a specific sex in African Bantu and Bantoid societies. Accusations may be competitive, allowing accusers to access resources that the ‘witch’ could have used. For example, men may target male relatives when competing for wealth to marry; co-wives in polygynous marriages vying for their husband’s investment may accuse other wives.
Materials and Methods Data was coded from ethnographic records. We examined factors predicting whether ‘witches’ were male or female (N = 423) using multilevel logistic regression. 
Results Men commonly accused men: such allegations were frequently between nonrelatives and blood relatives, in disputes over inheritance or property. Accusations of women were often from affinal kin (mostly husbands and co-wives). 
Discussion/conclusion Associations between specific relationships and situations and the sex of accused witches suggest how ‘phenotypes’ may develop within societies. The results are broadly consistent with evolutionary patterns of conflict and competition.

Same-sex competition and sexual conflict expressed through witchcraft accusations

**Author(s):** Pichkar, Y; Creanza, N Introduction: Human culture is both a bearer of history and an active force in it. The history of cultures can resemble that of our genes, but the impact of cultural identity on long-term patterns of human interaction has not been extensively researched. We leverage increasingly available genetic and cultural databases to explore how culture has shaped populations in Great Britain. Approach: We used the Survey of English Dialects to produce a map of linguistic variation, a type of cultural variation. From the genetic data collected for the People of the British Isles project, we reconstruct previously found genetic clustering (Leslie et al. 2015). Using the genetic variation within and between clusters, we measured whether genetic variation coincides with dialect borders. Results: We find that these patterns are strongest in areas with larger cultural divides–near Scotland and Wales–but correlations also exist closer to the center of England. Conclusions: These patterns suggest that cultural boundaries have shaped people’s preferences for movement and marriage over the last millennium, and that cultural identity may contribute to establishing genetic differentiation in a region.

Cultural reinforcement of genetic boundaries in England

**Author(s):** Raymond C; Sánchez-Villagra MR; Rangel-de Lázaro G; Lynch, S; Ward S; Wilson LAB Intro: Intentional cranial modification (ICM), the application of materials to the cranium of infants to permanently alter the head shape, has a long history and is found throughout the world. We collated global records of ICM to trace the origin and dispersal of these practices. 
Methods: We collated published records for Central (n=271), South (n=53), and North America (n=54), the Caribbean (n=113), and Eurasia (n=252), recording geographic location (decimal coordinates), ICM type, biological sex, period, and date. The temporal sequence of ICM practice was assessed using spatiotemporal kernel density estimation in R with spatstat and sparr packages. 
Results: Our database comprised 743 records, spanning 40 countries across five regions. We found the highest incidence of ICM throughout the New World and identified clusters of diverse modification types and potential areas of missing data due to sampling bias in the archaeological record. 
Discussion: We present a global overview of potential areas and times of diffusion, and cultural convergence. There were probably multiple developments of CM, mirrored also in the different social contexts and modes in which CM has been recorded.

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