Denmark

**Author(s):** Salali, GD; Uysal MS; Akpinar, E; Aksu, A; Bozyel, G &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Introduction: Studies to date have shown a strong correlation between belief in conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy. In this study, we go a step further and examine the pathway underlying the relationship between belief in health conspiracies and scepticism towards vaccines. We propose that conspiracy beliefs are deeply rooted in our tendency to form cultural groups, which throughout human evolution, has facilitated large-scale cooperation. We put forward the hypothesis that mistrust in outgroup members is the main driver of belief in conspiracies leading to vaccine hesitancy. &lt;br&gt;Methods: In a demographically representative cross-cultural survey with over 4500 participants from the UK, US and Turkey, we tested this hypothesis and controlled for several psychological and demographic variables including psychological reactance, belief in science, general mistrust, political orientation, religiosity, sex, age, education and financial satisfaction. &lt;br&gt;Results: Outgroup mistrust was the strongest predictor of belief in health (COVID-19-related) conspiracies across all countries, followed by psychological reactance- intolerance of others telling one what to do and being sceptical of consensus views. Control variables, including belief in science and general mistrust, had much weaker associations with the endorsement of health conspiracies compared to outgroup mistrust. There were considerable differences in the predictors of general conspiracy mentality and health-specific conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that distinct conspiracy beliefs have different psychological pathways. Our mediation analysis revealed that outgroup mistrust contributed to vaccine hesitancy through its association with health conspiracies. Participants in Turkey and the US scored higher on belief in health conspiracies, vaccine hesitancy and outgroup mistrust compared to the participants in the UK. The association between outgroup mistrust - but not reactance and belief in science- and health conspiracies held across countries. &lt;br&gt;Discussion: These findings suggest that cultures exhibiting higher outgroup mistrust are more inclined to believe in health conspiracies and in turn exhibit higher levels of vaccine hesitancy. Considering these findings, we suggest ways to tackle conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Outgroup mistrust drives the link between health conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy across cultures

cultural group formation

outgroup mistrust

vaccine hesitancy

cross-cultural psychology

conspiracy theories

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition 2021 will be held online for the first time. The event is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with virtual social events and a major online trade exhibition.



UKSG Annual Conference 2021

 UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. 

**Author(s):** Salali, GD; Uysal MS; Akpinar, E; Aksu, A; Bozyel, G Introduction: Studies to date have shown a strong correlation between belief in conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy. In this study, we go a step further and examine the pathway underlying the relationship between belief in health conspiracies and scepticism towards vaccines. We propose that conspiracy beliefs are deeply rooted in our tendency to form cultural groups, which throughout human evolution, has facilitated large-scale cooperation. We put forward the hypothesis that mistrust in outgroup members is the main driver of belief in conspiracies leading to vaccine hesitancy. Methods: In a demographically representative cross-cultural survey with over 4500 participants from the UK, US and Turkey, we tested this hypothesis and controlled for several psychological and demographic variables including psychological reactance, belief in science, general mistrust, political orientation, religiosity, sex, age, education and financial satisfaction. Results: Outgroup mistrust was the strongest predictor of belief in health (COVID-19-related) conspiracies across all countries, followed by psychological reactance- intolerance of others telling one what to do and being sceptical of consensus views. Control variables, including belief in science and general mistrust, had much weaker associations with the endorsement of health conspiracies compared to outgroup mistrust. There were considerable differences in the predictors of general conspiracy mentality and health-specific conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that distinct conspiracy beliefs have different psychological pathways. Our mediation analysis revealed that outgroup mistrust contributed to vaccine hesitancy through its association with health conspiracies. Participants in Turkey and the US scored higher on belief in health conspiracies, vaccine hesitancy and outgroup mistrust compared to the participants in the UK. The association between outgroup mistrust - but not reactance and belief in science- and health conspiracies held across countries. Discussion: These findings suggest that cultures exhibiting higher outgroup mistrust are more inclined to believe in health conspiracies and in turn exhibit higher levels of vaccine hesitancy. Considering these findings, we suggest ways to tackle conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy.

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.

**Author(s):** Ben-Oren, Y; Kolodny, O; Creanza, N The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes due to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions.

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

**Author(s):** Itao K; Kaneko K Anthropologists have observed gift relationships that establish social relations as well as the transference of goods in many human societies. The totality of social relations constitutes the network. Social scientists have analyzed different types of social organizations with characteristic network. However, the factors and mechanisms that cause the transition between these types are hardly explained. Here, we focus on the gift as the driving force for such change. We build the model by idealizing gift interactions and simulate the consequent social change due to long-term massive interactions. Through simulation, we demonstrate that as the frequency of the gift increases, the network structures are less clustered and more hierarchically organized. Also, the economic and social disparities successively emerge. These transition corresponds to the change from bands to tribes and to chiefdoms. Following this, statistical analysis using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, a global ethnographic database, empirically verifies the theoretical results on the emergence of disparities and hierarchical organizations due to the increase in the gift.

Transition of Social Organizations Driven by Gift Relationship

**Author(s):** Barrett, BJ, Wild, S., Martin JM, Aplin LM Adoption of novel food is a major challenge for animals living in urban environments; the spread of innovation and establishment of traditions is one potential mechanism enabling its incorporation. Experimental introductions into groups of the same population have been a classic method to examine this mechanistic pathway. However, most studies have focused on the social learning of foraging techniques, which may have different associated social or cognitive biases. In this study, we conducted a two option and control experiment, presenting two novel foods (shelled almonds, coloured red or blue) in five neighbouring roosts of sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita). We tracked the spread of knowledge across social networks from trained demonstrators, and used experience weighted attraction models (EWA) to ask: (i) how social learning biases shape the acquisition of a novel food, and (ii) whether similarities in processing techniques can emerge within roosts or social associates, even in a continuous population. Examining the solves of 355 individuals, we found age-related differences, with juveniles - but not adults - exhibiting a conformist bias, preferentially choosing the most frequently eaten food. Lastly, when analysing 539 openings by 147 individuals, we found evidence for site-level differences that increased with distance and decreased with movement between sites.

Cultural diffusion experiments with novel food reveal age-dependent conformity and potential foraging traditions in neighbouring groups of urban parrots

**Author(s):** Colleran, Heidi Introduction: The demographic transition still remains a mystery. A shift from vertical to horizontal transmission is deemed instrumental in the spread of low fertility values, but we lack a mechanistic explanation for such a shift. Women’s personal advice networks are where ideas about fertility practices are exchanged, and are key to understanding this change. We expect that economic and cultural changes in rural areas lead to increasingly valuing non-kin over kin, and ego characteristics influence these friendship dynamics. 
Methods:
Here, using comprehensive demographic and relational data from 22 communities in rural Poland, we investigated how women’s personal networks change with ego-level attributes, and how network characteristics affect cultural transmission. We focused on network composition and interaction, bi-lateral social support, closeness and emotional support. 
Results:
We found that women characterized by less traditional values (i.e. high education, non-farming occupation) have less kin and more unrelated friends in their networks, who they rely on for emotional support. Women characterized by traditional rural values rely on genetic kin and affines, for practical and financial support. Importantly, we found trade-offs between types of support across women. 
Conclusions: These shifting networks moderate information transmission and help explain the cultural transmission of low fertility values.

Female friendship and the horizontal transmission of low fertility values

 One of the central challenges facing the designers of cultural database projects is that of ontology. What should the units of analysis be? Should multiple units be allowed and, if so, how should they be related? In this talk we will explain how the Database of Religious History (DRH) project has responded to this challenge, explore the advantages and disadvantages of the approach we have adopted, and describe the tension we have confronted between allowing units of analysis to proliferate and maintaining coherence and usability in the database.

The Question of Ontology in Cultural Database Projects

**Author(s):** Hong, Ze; Chen, Yuqi Introduction: The study of rhetoric and argumentation has a long history in the western intellectual tradition, yet relatively less attention has been paid to its relationship between other cognitive themes such as reasoning and epistemology, as well as cultural and historical variation in persuasion practices in non-western contexts. Methods: We used keyword searches to identify persuasion episodes (763 total) in the official dynastic histories in China to systematically examine various rhetorical/argumentation strategies (e.g., argument by analogy, argument by authority, etc.) used in the past two millennia. Results: We found that early dynasties tend to have higher recorded persuasion success with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty, and there appears to be a temporal decline in the frequency in rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures (e.g., analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs). Conclusion: We found some support for adaptive cultural change in the type of arguments that people use. This study highlights the possibility of using rhetoric/argumentation as a tool to investigate reasoning and epistemology, as well as testing cultural evolutionary hypothesis using historical data.

Persuading the Emperors: A Quantitative Historical Analysis of Political Rhetoric in Traditional China

**Author(s):** Atkinson, Q D; Bouckaert, R B; Gray, R D; Jones, K; Kyritsis, T; Redding, D; Sheehan, O Introduction: Since Darwin it has been recognized that global linguistic diversity is the product of millennia of cultural evolution. Over half of the world’s ~6-7000 languages are now threatened with extinction, yet we know little about the drivers of language diversification or its relationship to language threat. Methods: Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic inference techniques to generate a supertree of all extant human languages that integrates prior knowledge and uncertainty about linguistic diversification around the globe. Results: We show that lower diversification rates (and hence higher evolutionary distinctness) are linked to very high or low population density and landscape traversability, as well as to cultures that are reliant on foraging and lack political links beyond the local community. Evolutionary distinctness is also associated with greater extinction risk. Conclusions: Our findings provide insight into the forces shaping language evolution, indicate more of the evolutionary history of languages is at risk than expected under a random threat distribution, and provide cross-cultural researchers with a supertree or the world’s languages.

Global language diversification rates are linked to socio-ecology and extinction risk

**Author(s):** Hagen, RV; Scelza, BA; Barrett, HC Introduction: Patriarchy likely has its roots in an evolutionary history of sexual conflict, but variation in women's interests in gender norms today is often overlooked. We consider whether women themselves can sometimes benefit from unequal gender norms, such as through gains from alliances with high-status men or benefits to male offspring. Also, younger women may experience higher costs than older women. We test whether these hypothesized interests are reflected in stated gender attitudes. Methods: We use survey data from China (n = 4126), Taiwan (2024), Japan (2660) and South Korea (1051) and Bayesian multi-level regression models to test predictions. Findings: In most countries, women’s views grow more patriarchal with age at a rate faster than for men (Taiwan: β = -.07, P(β < 0) = .88, China: β = -.10, P(β < 0) = .99, Japan: β = 0.0, P(β < 0) = .52, S Korea: β = -.06, P(β < 0) = .76), suggesting this is not due to generational norm changes alone. The predicted SES-effect was only found in Taiwan (β = -.28, P(β < 0) = .93). In China (β = -.09, P(β < 0) = .95) and S Korea (β = -. 22, P(β < 0) = .94) a higher ratio of sons to daughters is linked with more unequal gender views, and this is mostly driven by an item representing son preference. Discussion: Some of the variation in people’s attitudes to gender norms may be explained through their varying interests in such norms. The costs women experience from unequal norms likely decrease with age. Having more sons is associated with a stronger son-preference, but does not affect other norms tested in this study.

Understanding women's support for patriarchal gender norms in four East Asian countries

 Why do humans spend valuable resources on mortuary rituals? Evidence from fieldwork in a Romanian village and ethnographic literature suggests that costly signals of generosity activate intuitions about cooperation with the dead represented by an enduring “person-file system” (Boyer 2002). Performers use rituals to increase their reputation as cooperators as well as powerful and wealthy people (Hayden 2009). Family, relatives, friends, and other consociates perceive such investments as mutualistic cooperation (Baumard 2016) calibrated according to partner value. The model explains some recurrent features: fear of ancestor vengeance and peer moralization for ritual omission or underinvestment, the preferential treatment of the dead’s partners, variable but finite timescale of mortuary dues, overinvestment for high-status dead, the irrelevancy of grief, and the role of inheritance. Cultural attraction (Sperber 1996) can explain similarities and variability in ritual expenditure across societies.

Mortuary ritual investment as cues of mutualistic cooperation beyond death

Here we use the tools of behavioural ecology to try and understand the evolution of religious beliefs and practices; specifically our recent studies of the causes and consequences of religious celibacy in Amdo Tibetans (in western PRC). Historically a large number of young boys were sent to live a celibate life in monasteries. We find that this apparently costly practice of sending sons to the monastery, does in fact have kin selected benefits for other family members. We also examine the implication for local sex ratios, and for the workloads of men and women. It appears that ecology and kin selection can underpin apparently costly behaviours, generating gender biased behaviour and even the emergence of religious institutions.

Outgroup mistrust drives the link between health conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy across cultures

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

Similar lecture

Night Words: Obliteration and Social Media's Ever-Evolving Cost-Benefit Calculus

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES