The Experimental Study of Cultural Innovation

Abstract

This chapter reports two case studies in which experimental simulations of cultural transmission have provided insights into the processes of cultural innovation. The first case study shows how experimental laboratory simulations can provide valuable insights into the processes that govern cultural invention and innovation. The second reveals that when the fitness of an artifact is identified by a multimodal adaptive landscape, then individual learning can cause artifacts to diverge to different locally adaptive states, that is, generate multiple stable inventions, whereas biased cultural transmission can cause artifacts to converge on a single globally adaptive form, that is, produce an innovation.

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