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Towards a general model of cultural inheritance
Hillerová, Pavlína ; Tureček, Petr (advisor) ; Šaffa, Gabriel (referee)
Hypertrophied human culture is based on a specific propensity for social learning. During the transmission of information, a myriad of external and internal influences act on both the transmitor and recipient. Previous studies have focused on various biases (prestige bias, which causes, among others, a tendency to learn from older and more experienced individuals, or negative information bias, which makes us more likely to remember what to avoid etc.) that influence which cultural variants will successfully spread and how they will evolve. Some works delve into (among other things, bias-induced) cultural attraction, i.e., the tendency to transform information in a particular direction, while others treat cultural elements as genes; as nearly immutable entities. Almost all of them, however, (1.) model culture as composed from discrete entities and (2.) move within a single framework that they try to explore thoroughly. The present thesis attempts to bridge these gaps and to show the possibilities of studying cultural traits on a continuous scale. Using data from an application styled as a trivia guessing game, it aims to quantify the influence of different factors on the transmission of cultural information. Participants are presented with previous participants' estimates of different lengths, weights and...
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