Head

Magnus Enquist

Board committee

• Ove Eriksson, Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences (chair)
• Gunilla Eriksson, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies
• Torun Lindholm, Department of Psychology
• Elisabeth Mansen, Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies
• Niklas Janz, Department of Zoology
• Ljuba Veselinova, Department of Linguistics
• Robert Östling, Institute for International Economic Studies

Partners

The centre is part of the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, and works closely with several departments at Stockholm University and other institutes. We are interested in developing new collaborations with other departments and researchers that are interested in questions related to how and why culture changes. Currently we are involved in projects with the following departments.

Stockholm University

Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies
Department of Zoology
Department of Lingustics
Department of Sociology

Other institutes

Institute for Futures Studies
School of Education, Culture and Communication, Mälardalen University
School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences, Brooklyn College

This course on cultural evolution aims at tearing down barriers between disciplines. We welcome students from the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences. The course introduces theory on cultural change from different subjects and shows how methods like computational modelling and experiments can be applied to understand human and social phenomena.

Course description

The course gives and overview of patterns of cultural change and the diversity of theories and methods used in research on cultural evolution.

Photo: Johan Lind

Students will analyse differences between humans and other animals and what lies behind the emergence of cultural complexity and diversity. You will learn about how mathematics can be an important tool for theoretical work and how to formalise ideas to generate testable hypotheses. You will learn about the benefits of interdisciplinary interactions in terms of utilizing knowledge from different disciplines. You will also be encouraged to contribute with knowledge from your own field. You will meet fellow students and active researchers from the humanities, social and natural sciences, which is beneficial for future research cooperation across disciplines.

Course organisation

We offer two courses that run at 50% time in the evening during the entire spring term. This is the first course, which covers the diversity of observations of cultural change and theories seeking to explain them. In the subsequent course "Cultural evolution: project" (7,5 hp) you will produce an interdisciplinary paper on a topic of your choice related to cultural change.

The courses are organized by the Centre for Cultural Evolution in collaboration with the departments of Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics, Archaeology and Classical Studies, Culture and Aesthetics, Zoology, and Biology Education. The courses are open to master students and Ph.D. students from all academic areas. The courses can be included as elective or optional in a large number of Master's programs or degrees. For information about integration of the courses in your degree, consult your department's home page or study councellor.

Information and application

This course allows you to go deeper into one of the areas that you encounter in the first course on cultural evolution by carrying out your own project.

After taking the first course "Cultural evolution: theory and observations", students can proceed with examining an explicit area more thoroughly. You will produce an interdisciplinary paper on a topic of your own choice related to cultural change. The topic of the project will be defined in agreement with the one of the teachers who is specialised in your area of interest. The topic should be related to the emergence, spread or change of culture, and should be theoretically grounded in one of the research fields within the humanities or social or natural sciences.

Information and application

Together with the Department of Zoology, we give a master's course called Human Behaviour: Biology and Culture (7.5hp). This course is part of the ethology master's program, but is open for anyone with an interest in cultural evolution and a relevant background. The course runs yearly at the end of the autumn semester.

Information and application

Every year we also give the course Ethology and Evolution within the course Basic biology, 7.5 hp, on the psychology programme at Karolinska Institute.

We aim at contributing to a general theory of cultural evolution, by taking relationships between cultural elements into account.

One of our ambitions is to contribute to a general theory of

Cultural system

cultural evolution. The mathematical theories of cultural evolution proposed by what is often referred to as the California School (established by Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd and Richerson) has not been able to approach many of the important questions that arise within social science and the humanities, for example systems of beliefs and opinions, social networks and political systems.

There is a need to shift from studying single cultural elements in isolation to studying systems of such cultural elements, and to how these systems of culture are created and how they change. These systems are created by the relationships between the separate elements. Focusing on these, we are also able to formalise and build upon existing theories within the social sciences and the humanities (e.g. dialectic, structuralism and social constructions).

We have seen how fluctuations (changes in fashion trends) easily emerge when cultural systems change, and that individuals' openness to new culture and a desire to be influential are important properties of a system (Acerbi et al. 2014; Enquist et al. 2017).

We have also studied theoretically how cultural systems strive towards consistency, but that completely consistent or conflict-free systems are unlikely to emerge (Aguilar et al. 2017).

We have also shown that some conditions for using evolutionary game theory to study human behaviour and cultural evolution are often not satisfied (Cownden et al. 2017).

References

• Acerbi, A., Ghirlanda, S., & Enquist, M. (2014). Regulatory traits: cultural influences on cultural evolution. In Evolution, Complexity and Artificial Life (pp. 135-147). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Aguilar, E., Acerbi, A., Enquist, M. & Jansson, F. (2017). Evolution of cultural systems. Manuscript.
• Cownden, D., Eriksson, K., & Strimling, P. (2017). A popular misapplication of evolutionary modeling to the study of human cooperation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(3), 421-427.
• Enquist, M., et al. (2017) Cultural evolution as a self-organizing process I. Transmission.  Manuscript.

How did humans become cultural beings?

How humans became cultural beings is the central research

Major evolutionary transitions. By Myworkforwiki (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped version.

question in our Wallenberg project Evolutionary transitions in humans. To answer this question, among other things, we need to understand animals' cognitive mechanisms and in what way humans are different.

We have carried out a comprehensive analysis of what is known about animal behaviour and cognitive mechansims, including hominoids (Lind et al. 2015, 2017; Enquist et al. 2016; Ghirlanda et al. 2017; Ghirlanda & Lind 2017). This has resulted in a model for the cognitive faculty that can explain why culture among animals is limited to simple traditions.

Standard explanations for how the unique human being evolved build on comprehensive genetic changes where culture plays a minor role. We have developed an alternative hypothesis where the genetic changes are more limited and cultural evolution has a more substantial bearing on understanding human evolution. Among other things, we have studied how self-organisation is possible in cultural evolution, and this can shape not only the content of culture, but also the evolutionary process in itself (Enquist et al. 2017).

References

• Enquist, M., et al. (2017) Cultural evolution as a self-organizing process I. Transmission.  Manuscript
• Enquist, M., Lind, J., & Ghirlanda, S. (2016). The power of associative learning and the ontogeny of optimal behaviour. Royal Society Open Science, 3(11), 160734.
• Ghirlanda, S., & Lind, J. (2017). ‘Aesop's fable’experiments demonstrate trial-and-error learning in birds, but no causal understanding. Animal Behaviour, 123, 239-247.
• Ghirlanda, S., Lind, J. & Enquist, M. (2017). Memory for stimulus sequences: A divide between humans and other animals? Royal Society Open Science, 4, 161011.
• Lind, J., Enquist, M., & Ghirlanda, S. (2015). Animal memory: A review of delayed matching-to-sample data. Behavioural Processes, 117, 52-58.
• Lind, J., Lönnberg, S., Persson, T., & Enquist, M. (2017). Time Does Not Help Orangutans Pongo abelii Solve Physical Problems. Frontiers in Psychology, 8.

Why do social norms change? Why is there sometimes a clear direction for how they change?

We study how social norms change and are maintained, in

Corporal punishment. German Federal Archive [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped version.

particular metanorms, that is, norms about norms. A common idea among evolutionary economists is that the reason for norms to be maintained is that deviating behaviour is punished and that those who punish thereby get a better reputation. On the contrary, however, we have found that punishers often get a bad reputation, and also that metanorms are different between cultures (Eriksson et al. 2016, 2017).

Our research is also about norm change within particular domains. We suggest a new theory for the important question within sociology on why norms of hygiene and violence seem to have a direction towards a stricter hygiene and less violence (Strimling et al. 2018). Our theory builds on the fact that, within these domains, there is a basic asymmetri in how threatening different behaviours are, which leads to a differentiation between how much various behaviours are punished. In turn, this leads to directed norm change.

In a similar project, we suggest a new theory for why moral norms (on abortion, gay marriage, etc.) tend to change in a liberal direction, and why this change varies in speed for different issues (Strimling et al. 2017). The theory builds on an asymmetri between liberal and conservative moral psychology in what kind of arguments are considered valid.

References

• Eriksson, K., Andersson, P. A., & Strimling, P. (2016). Moderators of the disapproval of peer punishment. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 19(2), 152-168.
• Eriksson, K., Strimling, P., Andersson, P.A., et al. (2017). Cultural Universals and Cultural Differences in Meta-Norms about Peer Punishment. Management and Organization Review, 13(4), 851-870.
• Strimling, P., de Barra, M. & Eriksson, K. (2018) Asymmetries in punishment propensity may drive the civilizing process. Nature Human Behaviour.
• Strimling, P., Vartanova, I., Jansson, F. & Eriksson, K. (2017) Why liberals are winning the culture war. Manuscript.

We also carry out empirical studies beyond the main research areas.

We conduct empirical research within a large variety of areas.

Democratic transitions

These are some of our recent projects:

In a large comparative study of legal systems, a total of 150 laws have been analysed and several patterns of change identified (Jarrick & Wallenberg-Bondesson).

In collaboration with political scientists, we have studies democratic transitions using detailed databases (Wang et al. 2017).

We have also studied language contact situations (Jansson et al. 2015), cooking and burial customs. These studies have involved development of quantitative methods for studying change (Isaksson et al. 2015, Lindenfors et al. 2017).

References

• Isaksson, S., Funcke, A., Envall, I., Enquist, M., & Lindenfors, P. (2015). A novel method to analyze social transmission in chronologically sequenced assemblages, implemented on cultural inheritance of the art of cooking. PloS one, 10(5), e0122092.
• Jansson, F., Parkvall, M., & Strimling, P. (2015). Modeling the evolution of creoles. Language Dynamics and Change, 5(1), 1-51.
• Lindenfors, P., Jansson, F., Wang, Y. T., & Lindberg, S. I. (2017). Investigating sequences in ordinal data: A new approach with adapted evolutionary models. Political Science Research and Methods, in press.
• Wang, Y. T., Lindenfors, P., Sundström, A., Jansson, F., & Lindberg, S. I.  (2017). Women's rights in democratic transitions: A global sequence analysis, 1900–2012. European Journal of Political Research, 56(4), 735-756.

We study causes of the demographic transition.

Demographic transition. Illustration by Iam Nee.

Through mathematical modelling, we have shown that cultural evolution, in constrast to biological evolution, can lead to declines in fertility (Kolk et al. 2014).

We have also initiated a critical evaluation of evolutionary psychology, focusing on explanations to infanticide.

References

• Kolk, M., Cownden, D., & Enquist, M. (2014). Correlations in fertility across generations: can low fertility persist? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 281(1779), 20132561.

From the city centre

Take the red metro line bound for Mörby centrum and get off at Universitetet. When you exit the station, turn immediately left round the corner of Pressbyrån and follow the pavement under the motorway. You will pass the small gardens on your left and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on your right. Proceed over the bridge with the railway station, turn right, pass the greenhouse and the large building on your left. Wallenberglaboratoriet is situated at the end of the small road, with the circle in front of it. It is less than 500 metres from the metro station to Wallenberglaboratoriet.

Bus lines 50, 540 and several Stockholm county lines also make stops at Universitetet next to the metro.

If you prefer a shorter walk, there is also a local train (Roslagsbanan) station 200 metres from the building. These trains depart usually about every five minutes from Östra station, next to the metro stop Tekniska högskolan.

Individuals, research groups and department are invited to take part in and contribute to research at CEK.

An important aim of CEK is to bring researchers together from different disciplines to discuss and study processes of cultural change. Another aim is to provide a productive research environment for such research. Individuals, research groups and departments are invited to take part in and contribute to research at CEK. This can take a number of different forms, including:

• Joining research projects that are already established at CEK
• Develop new research projects in collaboration with CEK
• Take part in joint research applications
• Informal discussions
• Take part in our seminar series
• Arrangement of meetings
• Collaboration with respect to teaching, courses and supervision for both undergraduate and PhD students.

Feel free to contact the director or any member of staff if you interested in discussions or collaboration.