New paper out with @JStubbersfield

"Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments"

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… We adapted transmission chain experiments (a laboratory version of the "telephone game") used in cultural evolution to use them with large language models like ChatGPT.

This plot, and the associated paper, periodically do the round on social media - and in the news, lately last week when it was picked up by some journalists with large following... ...in a way, its success is itself an example of what the plot is about (i.e., negative info is culturally palatable). Not sure if the trends would have been the other way around it would be the same...

Increase in sentiment negativity is not a recent trend in Western world, so that explanations linking in to contemporary events (or social media diffusion) are possibly not on the right track 1/4

https://twitter.com/acerbialberto/status/1583033920806797312

We found it, for example, in English language song lyrics, at least from the 60s... 2/4
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

I am collecting in this thread the material from the "Cultural evolution in the digital age" book club at cognitionandculture.net - big thank you to participants and organisers! my précis

https://twitter.com/acerbialberto/status/1269992738092703748

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out a few weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the seventh. 1/8 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… It starts discussing the concept of “meme” (not surprisingly, giving the topic of the book…) and why cultural evolutionists tend to be sceptical of the idea of replicators in cultural evolution 2/8

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out a few weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the sixth one. 1/8 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… It is a *long* chapter about the spread of online misinformation, broadly intended as factually incorrect claims. I first discuss various reasons why misinformation could be favoured online. 2/8

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out two weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the fifth one. 1/8 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… The existence of online echo chambers is consistent with psychological tendencies such as myside bias (search for, and preferentially accept, arguments that confirm our pre-existent positions), or similarity bias (copying from people similar to us). 2/8

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out two weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the fourth one. 1/7 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… After cues related to prestige (chapter 3), we move to popularity. The popularity of everything online is long-tailed, with few big winners and many not-su-much. 2/7

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out last week. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the third one. 1/7 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… I explore prestige bias in cultural evolution. How do we decide from whom to copy from? One can observe to whom other people show signs of deference or respect, or simply whom they tend to hang around more, and copy from them. 2/7

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out last week. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the second one. 1/7 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… I start to dig properly into cultural evolution. The digital age produces an enormous amount of data on human behaviour, and this obviously attracted a lot of research. But computational social science needs to be also theory-rich. 2/7

My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out this week. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the first one. 1/7 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… The title says pretty much what it is about. It starts discussing research inspired by social brain hypothesis. Once we avoid overly simplistic interpretations (“you can have only 150 friends!”), the idea that there are limits to the size of our social networks is reasonable. 2/7

Doing a mini-review of cultural evolution-inspired experiments on conformity ('disproportionate tendency to copy the majority') with adults. Trying to not be myself biased, but only 1 out of 10 found strong support. Popularity cues interact with many other factors and, in general, they are almost never followed automatically. Is there something obvious I overlooked?