THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SCHEMAS AND LOSSY CONCEPTUAL INFORMATION NETWORKS: HOW INFORMATION TRANSMISSION CAN LEAD TO THE APPARENT “EMERGENCE” OF CULTURE

Abstract

This chapter presents a new model of cultural information transmission, based on theories from cognitive anthropology, and discusses its results in relation to cultural dynamics that affect the stability of social groups, potentially resulting in changes in identity, beliefs, and large-scale demographic shifts. It also discusses the issues of reducing the interactions of agents in an agent-based model (ABM) from their group-level patterns to their individual-level properties and capacities. Then the chapter presents a presentation and discussion of an ABM that can generate social consensus in ways that replicates patterns observed by anthropologists, with patterns that are not reducible to the "sum of its parts". The chapter further describes how the requirements, when implemented in an ABM, can help us to understand the emergence of social schemas. The social schema of a group is calculated using a lossy intersection method.

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