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Public Relations Failures by Russian State Officials: A Botched Cultural Transmission?
Victoria Fomina16 July 20202
In 2018, during a public meeting, Olga Glatskikh, head of the Sverdlovsk Region Youth Politics Department, gave the following response to a question about the lack of state funding for youth

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“Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age” Book Club General Discussion
Tiffany Morisseau29 June 202010
Join the discussion of our Book Club here! You will find on the Book Club page: the précis of the book by Alberto Acerbi, commentaries by Alex Mesoudi, Hugo Mercier, Mathieu Charbonneau, Olivier

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Alberto Acerbi’s response: There is much work to do
Alberto Acerbi29 June 20201
It was a great pleasure having a book club dedicated to Cultural evolution in the digital age. Writing a book feels like a long and solitary experience and it is comforting that, when done, it may

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Truth is not always the point
Tiffany Morisseau25 June 20201
Thank you, Alberto, for writing this book! In addition to being a captivating reading, it shed light on some thoughts I had on how people share information on social media, and what truth has to do

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Cultural evolution – The mystery of production
Pascal Boyer23 June 20201
Alberto Acerbi’s book is not just an impressive and timely summary of our knowledge of cultural transmission in the digital world (that in itself would be a good reason to read it). It also

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The Participatory Age
Mathieu Charbonneau19 June 20201
Of central interest to Alberto, and to cultural evolutionists in general, are the impacts of the transmission of cultural information from one person to the next—what is transmitted to whom, where

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Consuming vs. sharing information online
Hugo Mercier17 June 20201
In his brilliant book, Alberto notes a series of significant differences between information sharing in oral cultures and online (to take two extremes). Oral cultures are dependent on memorization

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Cultural transmission, reinvention, and progress
Olivier Morin15 June 20201
I sometimes wonder why some of the cleverest things about the digital age seem to date from before the digital age really started. Few philosophical analyses beat thought experiments like Turing's

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What’s the recipe?
Sacha Altay12 June 20201
In his book, Alberto pointed out that information can now be passed on, and ultimately become cultural, without being memorized or even understood. But online information can also become cultural

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Are humans ‘wary learners’?
Alex Mesoudi10 June 20201
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Alberto Acerbi’s Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age (Acerbi, 2019). It provides not only a much-needed corrective to overblown claims about the power of social

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A précis of ‘Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age’
Alberto Acerbi8 June 20201
When, at the beginning of 2016, I started to think about the project that would have become the book Cultural evolution in the digital age, my goal was to apply cultural evolution theory to a topic

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‘Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age’ Book Club
Tiffany Morisseau8 June 20200
Alberto Acerbi’s timely new book, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age, offers a cultural evolutionary perspective on our behavior online, and on its cumulative effects on information diffusion

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Board games, intuitive monopolists, and pedagogical Georgists
Radu Umbres19 May 20203
I grew up in socialist Romania and I have played Monopoly since I was 10 with a game brought from West Germany by family friends. I loved the game and the fact that my social value among playmates

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Quiet online spaces as a form of mutualistic nudging for our hyper-networked world
Dan Sperber11 May 20203
On April 26, 2020, the Guardian published an article entitled “As isolation stress sets in, many find that sharing quiet online spaces is the key to boosting brain power.” It began, “There

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Do COVID-19 conspiracy theories stem from gullibility or skepticism?
Inge van de Ven31 March 20200
When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic that has the world in its grip, gaps in public knowledge still abound. It is therefore not surprising that during the last weeks a whole bunch of

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Ubiquitous yet nowhere to be found: on the Invisible Hand’s success
Helena Miton6 March 20201
Adam Smith’s invisible hand is a tremendously successful metaphor. Quotes abound to state how important and pervasive the idea is (and was) for both economics and social sciences at large. Yet,

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How relevant to the psychology of mindreading is knowledge-first epistemology?
Pierre Jacob8 February 20200
Some epistemic mental states with propositional content (e.g. knowing, perceiving, remembering) are commonly said to be factive on the grounds that one cannot know, see, hear or remember what is not

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Could mindshaping be the bedrock of human social cognition?
Pierre Jacob9 January 20200
The uniformity that unites us in communication and belief is a uniformity of resultant patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of connections between words and experience. Uniformity comes

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If teleology is the answer, what was the question?
Pierre Jacob12 December 20190
Josef Perner is one of the leading developmental psychologists of mindreading (or mental state attribution). His contribution to the subject, including his influential (1991) book, has been huge. It

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A natural experiment of gradual & contingent cultural causation
Thom Scott-Phillips2 September 20192
A new study about some old news, with results that demonstrate the promiscuous and highly contingent nature of cultural causation. In April 1989 Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were scheduled to

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Ostension, insistence, and harassment
Dan Sperber29 July 20190
Last week, the “Social Minds: Coordination, Communication, and Cultural Transmission” project was having a five-day workshop at the Burn, a manor in the Scottish Highlands. Elizabeth Warren (a

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How Jordan Peterson became an Intellectual Guru
Inge van de Ven23 May 20190

I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about, and I’m not sure I can do it justice. Its scope is so broad that I can see only parts of it clearly at one time, and it is exceedingly difficult to set down comprehensibly in writing.
- Jordan Peterson (1999, 473)

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Signalling signalhood as a means of protest
Thom Scott-Phillips11 May 20192

A few days ago Kazakh police detained a young man holding a poster in Abay Square in Oral, Western Kazakhstan. The poster, however, was blank, and Aslan Sagutdinov was later released without charged. Apparently the authorities could not agree what to charge him with. It’s like this old Soviet joke. A policeman approaches and detains a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Looking at the leaflets he finds them blank. “Why are they blank?”, he asks. “Why write anything?”, says the man. “Everyone understands.”

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Call for papers: Cognitive Science of Nationalistic Behavior – Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives
The ICCI Team4 May 20190

The Journal of Cognition and Culture (Brill) is hosting a special issue (edited by Dr Michal Fux, Northeastern University) on the role of cognitive science in nationalistic thought and behaviour (CSNB). Spurred by the rise in popularity of nation-based separatist movements, which followed an era of a steady move toward globalization, the editing team is interested in filling a surprising scholarly gap by establishing a wide explanatory framework / cognitive model for CSNB thoroughly integrated with what is known about human cognition and its evolution.

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