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Alberto Acerbi Profile picture
Alberto Acerbi
@acerbialberto
Cognitive anthropology / cultural evolution / digital media / cultural analytics. Assistant professor sociology @UniTrento - more info in the pinned tweet.
Jun 27 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
🚨New preprint with @Arkyfish

What drives engagement with *reliable* news on social media? Most research on online information spreading focuses on misinformation, but we switched the attention to reliable news.
Reliable news are much more common than misinformation - and there is decreasing trust in traditional news outlets.
Oct 27, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
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.
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Oct 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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... Image ...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...
Oct 22, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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 We found it, for example, in English language song lyrics, at least from the 60s... 2/4
cambridge.org/core/journals/… Image
Jun 20, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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
Dec 30, 2019 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
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… Image 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 Image
Dec 28, 2019 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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… Image 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
Dec 19, 2019 • 12 tweets • 7 min read
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… Image 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
Dec 16, 2019 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
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… Image 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 Image
Dec 11, 2019 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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… Image 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
Dec 9, 2019 • 11 tweets • 7 min read
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… Image 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
Dec 6, 2019 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
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… Image 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
Jan 20, 2019 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
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?