In this paper, we adopt a dynamic perspective on networks and creativity to propose that the oft-theorized creative benefits of open networks and heterogeneous
content are less likely to be accrued over time if the network is stable. Specifically, we hypothesize that open networks and content heterogeneity will have a
more positive effect on creativity when network stability is low.
We base our prediction on the fact that, over time, network stability begets cognitive rigidity and social rigidity, thus limiting individuals’ ability to make
use of the creative advantages provided by open networks and heterogeneous content. On the contrary, new ties bring a positive “shock” that pushes individuals in
the network to change the way they organize and process knowledge, as well as the way they interact and collaborate—a shock that enables creators to accrue the
creative advantages provided by open network structures and heterogeneous content.
We test and find support for our theory in a study on the core artists who worked on the TV series Doctor Who between 1963 and 2014.
Culture—the totality of traditions acquired in a community by social learning from other individuals—has increasingly been found to be pervasive not only in
humans’ but in many other animals’ lives. Compared with learning on one’s own initiative, learning from others can be very much safer and more efficient, as the
wisdom already accumulated by other individuals is assimilated.
This article offers an overview of often surprising recent discoveries charting the reach of culture across an ever-expanding diversity of species, as well as
an extensive variety of behavioral domains, and throughout an animal’s life. The psychological reach of culture is reflected in the knowledge and skills an animal
thus acquires, via an array of different social learning processes. Social learning is often further guided by a suite of adaptive psychological biases, such as
conformity and learning from optimal models. In humans, cumulative cultural change over generations has generated the complex cultural phenomena observed
today.
Animal cultures have been thought to lack this cumulative power, but recent findings suggest that elementary versions of cumulative culture may be important in
animals’ lives.
[Keywords: culture, traditions, social learning, cultural evolution, cumulative culture]
Expertise provides numerous benefits. Experts process information more efficiently, remember information better, and often make better decisions. Consumers
pursue expertise in domains they love and chase experiences that make them feel something. Yet, might becoming an expert carry a cost for these very feelings?
Across more than 700,000 consumers and 6 million observations, developing expertise in a hedonic domain predicts consumers becoming more emotionally numb—that is,
having less intense emotion in response to their experiences. This numbness occurs across a range of domains—movies, photography, wine, and beer—and across diverse
measures of emotion and expertise. It occurs in cross-sectional real-world data with certified experts, and in longitudinal real-world data that follows consumers
over time and traces their emotional trajectories as they accrue expertise. Furthermore, this numbness can be explained by the cognitive structure experts develop
and apply within a domain. Experimentally inducing cognitive structure led novice consumers to experience greater numbness. However, shifting experts away from
using their cognitive structure restored their experience of emotion. Thus, although consumers actively pursue expertise in domains that bring them pleasure, the
present work is the first to show that this pursuit can come with a hedonic cost.
Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by word of mouth.
We introduce to economics a unique catalog of oral traditions by Yuri Berezkin spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalog’s content by
showing that the groups’ motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present 2 sets of applications.
First, we illustrate how to fill in the gaps and expand upon a group’s ethnographic record, focusing on political complexity, high gods, and trade. Second, we
discuss how machine learning and human classification methods can help shed light on cultural traits, using gender roles, attitudes toward risk, and trust as
examples. Societies with tales portraying men as dominant and women as submissive tend to relegate their women to subordinate positions in their communities, both
historically and today. More risk-averse and less entrepreneurial people grew up
listening to stories wherein competitions and challenges are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Communities with low tolerance toward antisocial behavior,
captured by the prevalence of tricksters being punished, are more trusting and prosperous today. These patterns hold across groups, countries, and
second-generation immigrants.
Overall, the results highlight the importance of folklore in cultural economics, calling for additional applications.
How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of “recreations” data
(n = 71,393) contained within Who’s Who,
a unique catalogue of the British elite…In November 2016, after extensive discussions with Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing—the 2 publishing companies producing Who’s Who—we successfully brokered access to all data
collected by the publication since it began including full biographical details in 1897…Finally, to provide a more granular analysis of elite musical taste, we
combine Who’s Who with another unique historical data source—the archive of Desert Island Discs, a radio show broadcast on the BBC since 1942
(Brown et al 2017; Dean et al 2018; Thurman 2012). The format of the show is straightforward. Each week a “castaway”—usually a
noteworthy and influential elite person—is asked to choose 8 songs or pieces of music they would take with them if they were to be stranded on a desert island. As
over 60% of the people who have appeared on Desert Island Discs are also in Who’s Who, we are able to merge the 2 datasets to provide a more
granular analysis of the music tastes of around 1,200 Who’s Who entrants.
Our results reveal 3 historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by
landed estates, which waned substantially in the late-nineteenth century; second, a highbrow mode dominated by the fine arts, which increased sharply in the
early-twentieth century before gently receding in the most recent birth cohorts; and, third, a contemporary mode characterized by the blending of highbrow pursuits
with everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets.
These shifts reveal changes not only in the contents of elite culture but also in the nature of elite distinction, in particular, (1) how the applicability of
emulation and (mis)recognition theories has changed over time, and (2) the emergence of a contemporary mode that publicly emphasizes everyday cultural practice (to
accentuate ordinariness, authenticity, and cultural connection) while retaining many tastes that continue to be (mis)recognized as legitimate.
…Our analysis begins by identifying a mode of aristocratic elite culture, dominant in the late-nineteenth century, that was forged around the leisure
possibilities afforded by landed estates (eg. shooting, hunting, horse riding, polo, sailing). Here elites achieved distinction via the emulation of lower yet
aspirational social groups, who largely deferred to their authority as inherent cultural paragons. We then show how this mode was threatened at the turn of the
twentieth century. “Nouveau riche” industrialists began to buy their way into high society, and existing aristocratic elites, battling economic upheaval, were
unable to guard against this pecuniary emulation. Next, we show how a new generation of elites—influenced in particular by the Bloomsbury intellectual
collective—adapted to this threat. Positioning itself against the philistinism of aristocratic modes, this new cohort championed a set of emerging “high” cultural
forms (eg. theater, ballet, classical music, abstract art) that went on to define elite culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This new highbrow mode was
successful in delivering distinction, albeit via a different mechanism. Rather than relying on an ascribed cultural legitimacy, as in the emulation model, highbrow
elites instead focused on generating a widespread (mis)recognition, via the state and allied institutions such as the BBC, of the inherent value of their own tastes and recreations. Again, though, this mode of elite culture was eventually questioned.
Beginning in the 1950s, the supremacy of highbrow culture was threatened by shifts within the art-world that initially challenged the highbrow aesthetic and later
legitimized certain popular cultural forms; generational value change that precipitated a decline in snobbery and deference (to elites); and the emergence of a
managerial culture where access to a broad cultural repertoire functioned as a key resource.
The final part of our analysis explains how once again elites adapted to these threats, diversifying their cultural profiles and increasingly blending highbrow
(and some aristocratic) recreations with popular tastes and a range of everyday practices, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. We interpret this
contemporary mode as pursuing dual aims. First, it continues to be distinction-seeking, with popular tastes still tilting toward more legitimate artists. However,
the growing expression of everyday recreations, we argue, also signals something beyond distinction, and peculiar to the particular moral threats facing
contemporary elites. As elites pull away economically, they face increasing suspicion from wider publics that they lack prosocial motives and, in turn,
authenticity and moral character. The public expression of such “ordinary” everyday practices, therefore, with their intrinsic rather than extrinsic reward
association, acts as a way to plug this authenticity-insecurity.
…Second, we go further to examine the legitimacy of the popular music being played. Specifically, we examined the critical-acclaim of musical artists by
analyzing their average score on the music website Metacritic, which
aggregates reviews of albums. Figure 6 shows that the artists played by Who’s Who entrants are consistently more legitimate, in terms of their mean Metacritic
score, than the average musical artist.25 Indeed, they are consistently in the top quartile. This indicates that although contemporary elites may be
increasingly integrating popular cultural forms into their cultural repertoires, the individual artists they prefer still tilt toward the legitimate and
consecrated.
The end of the government-controlled Salon started the appreciation of impressionism.
Evidence that the liberalization of art exhibitions started the appreciation of art innovations.
A study of the impact of 1880 liberalization of art exhibitions in Paris.
Difference-in difference estimation on art policy.
We analyze the art market in Paris between the government-controlled Salon and the post-1880 system, when the Republican government liberalized art exhibitions.
The jury of the old Salon decided on submissions with a bias in favor of conservative art of the academic insiders, erecting entry barriers against outsiders as
the Impressionists. With a difference-in difference estimation, we provide evidence that the end of the government-controlled Salon contributed to start the price
increase of the Impressionists relative to the insiders.
[Keywords: Art market, Liberalization, Market structure, Insider-outsider, Hedonic regressions, Impressionism]
Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural
memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the
temporal decay of the attention received by cultural products. We show that, once we isolate the temporal dimension of the decay, the attention received by
cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function. We explain this universality by proposing a mathematical model based on communicative and
cultural memory, which fits the data better than previously proposed log-normal and exponential models. Our results reveal that biographies remain in our
communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years). These findings show that the average attention received by cultural
products decays following a universal biexponential function.
Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications
might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these
cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, and the spread of initially
unpopular beliefs. Results obtained from more than 300,000 computer simulations showed that in populations characterized by greater susceptibility to social
influence, there was more rapid consolidation of majority opinion and also more successful spread of initially unpopular beliefs. Initially unpopular beliefs also
spread more readily in populations characterized by less densely connected social networks. These computational outputs highlight the value of computational
modeling methods as a means to specify hypotheses about specific ways in which cross-cultural differences may have long-term consequences for cultural stability
and cultural change.
In recent decades, a burgeoning literature has documented the cultural transmission of behavior through social learning in numerous vertebrate and invertebrate
species. One meaning of “cultural evolution in animals” refers to these discoveries, and I present an overview of key findings. I then address the other meaning of
the term focused on cultural changes within a lineage. Such changes in humans, described as “cumulative cultural evolution,” have been spectacular, but relatively
little attention has yet been paid to the topic in nonhuman animals, other than asserting that the process is unique to humans. A variety of evidence including
both controlled experiments and field observations has begun to challenge this view, and in some behavioral domains, notably birdsong, cultural evolution has been
studied for many years. In this review, I dissect concepts of cultural evolution and cumulative culture and appraise the accumulating evidence bearing on their
nature and significance for evolutionary biology at large.
What would it be like to revisit a museum, restaurant, or city you just visited? To rewatch a movie you just watched? To replay a game you just played? People
often have opportunities to repeat hedonic activities. Seven studies (total N = 3,356) suggest that such opportunities may be undervalued: Many repeat
experiences are not as dull as they appear. Studies 1–3 documented the basic effect. All participants first completed a real-world activity once in full
(Study 1, museum exhibit; Study 2, movie; Study 3, video game). Then, some predicted their reactions to repeating it whereas others actually repeated it.
Predictors underestimated Experiencers’ enjoyment, even when experienced enjoyment indeed declined. Studies 4 and 5 compared mechanisms: neglecting the pleasurable
byproduct of continued exposure to the same content (eg. fluency) versus neglecting the new content that manifests by virtue of continued exposure (eg. discovery),
both of which might dilute uniform dullness. We found stronger support for the latter: The misprediction was moderated by stimulus complexity (Studies 4 and 5) and
mediated by the amount of novelty discovered within the stimulus (Study 5), holding exposure constant. Doing something once may engender an inflated sense that one
has now seen “it”, leaving people naïve to the missed nuances remaining to enjoy. Studies 6 and 7 highlighted consequences: Participants incurred costs to avoid
repeats so to maximize enjoyment, in specific contexts for which repetition would have been as enjoyable (Study 6) or more enjoyable (Study 7) as the provided
novel alternative. These findings warrant a new look at traditional assumptions about hedonic adaptation and novelty preferences. Repetition too could add an
unforeseen spice to life.
Does creativity, on average, increase or decrease during bereavement?
Dates of death of relatives and close friends of 33 French artists and 15 American artists were gathered from electronic sources and biographies, and
information on over 15,000 paintings was collected from the Blouin Art Sales
Index and the online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Musée d’Orsay, including more than 12,000 observations on price.
An event study indicates that there is no evidence that the death of a friend or
relative makes an artist more creative, and there is some evidence that prices of paintings are statistically-significantly lower during the first year following
the year of death of a friend or relative. Furthermore, paintings that were created during this bereavement period are less likely to be included in a major
museum’s collection.
[Keywords: creativity, death, artist, art auctions, bereavement]
Much research demonstrates that exposure to thin media ideals has a negative effect on women’s body image.
The present research suggests a notable and important exception to this rule. The authors propose the parasocial relationship-moderation
hypothesis—that parasocial, or one-sided,
relationships (PSRs) moderate the effects of thin media figures on body image. Specifically, the authors propose
that having a PSR with a media figure increases the likelihood of assimilating, rather than contrasting, the
PSR’s body to the self.
Study 1 found that women who perceived similarity with a thin model felt better about their bodies than those who did not perceive similarity.
Study 2 found that women were more satisfied with their bodies after exposure to a favorite celebrity they perceived as thin than a control celebrity
they perceived as thin.
Finally, Study 3 suggests that assimilation was the underlying mechanism of increased body satisfaction after exposure to a thin favorite celebrity.
[Keywords: social comparison, assimilation, body image, parasocial relationships]
This research introduces “brand prominence”, a construct reflecting the conspicuousness of a brand’s mark or logo on a product.
The authors propose a taxonomy that assigns consumers to one of four groups according to their wealth and need for status, and they demonstrate how each group’s
preference for conspicuously or inconspicuously branded luxury goods corresponds predictably with their desire to associate or dissociate with members of their own
and other groups. Wealthy consumers low in need for status want to associate with their own kind and pay a premium for quiet goods only they can recognize. Wealthy
consumers high in need for status use loud luxury goods to signal to the less affluent that they are not one of them. Those who are high in need for status but
cannot afford true luxury use loud counterfeits to emulate those they recognize to be wealthy.
Field experiments along with analysis of market data (including counterfeits) support the proposed model of status signaling using brand prominence.
This article is the antidote to news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the reading
habit and struggle to absorb more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap—if you are not already too deeply in it.
[cf. “Why Fiction Lies”, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic
Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, reverse
dominance hierarchy] The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these
differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers
groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-seeking and dominance behaviors that are stigmatized in such groups.
This hypothesis was tested with an online questionnaire listing characters from 201 canonical British novels of the longer nineteenth century. 519 respondents
generated 1470 protocols on 435 characters. Respondents identified the characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, judged the characters’ motives
according to human life history theory, rated the characters’ traits according to the five-factor model of personality, and specified their own emotional responses
to the characters on categories adapted from Ekman’s seven basic emotions.
As expected, antagonists are motivated almost exclusively by the desire for social dominance, their personality traits correspond to this motive, and they
elicit strongly negative emotional responses from readers. Protagonists are oriented to cooperative and affiliative behavior and elicit positive emotional
responses from readers. Novels therefore apparently enable readers to participate vicariously in an egalitarian social dynamic like that found in hunter-gatherer
societies.
We infer that agonistic structure in novels simulates social behaviors that fulfill an adaptive social function and perhaps stimulates impulses toward these
behaviors in real life.
[Keywords: egalitarian groups, literature, social dominance, stigmatization]
[“We were not surprised to find that protagonists evoked feelings of fondness and admiration, while protagonists aroused feelings of anger and contempt”,
Johnson said. “But 2 deeper questions are, first, what is it about good guys and bad guys that stir up different feelings in the reader, and, second, what is
the purpose of literature that arouses these feelings? Our data indicate that readers like protagonists because they have more mild-mannered personalities and are
motivated by a desire to help others and build alliances. Antagonists, on the other hand, are disliked because they are more aggressive and are motivated by
self-interest, by the acquisition of personal wealth, power, and prestige. We believe that the purpose of this kind of literature is to activate emotions that
encourage people to engage in ethical behaviour in real life.”
To reach this conclusion, Johnson and his colleagues departed from traditional methods of literary studies and adopted a scientific approach. They gathered
literary character ratings from more than 500 literary scholars, and tested specific hypotheses about Victorian novels.]
After the quantitative diagrams of the first chapter, and the spatial ones of the second, evolutionary trees constitute morphological diagrams, where
history is systematically correlated with form. And indeed, in contrast to literary studies—where theories of form are usually blind to history, and historical
work blind to form—for evolutionary thought morphology and history are truly the two dimensions of the same tree: where the vertical axis charts, from the bottom
up, the regular passage of time (every interval, writes Darwin, ‘one thousand generations’), while the horizontal one follows the formal diversification (‘the
little fans of diverging dotted lines’) that will eventually lead to ‘well-marked varieties’, or to entirely new species.
The horizontal axis follows formal diversification . . . But Darwin’s words are stronger: he speaks of ‘this rather perplexing subject’—elsewhere, ‘perplexing &
unintelligible’ 4—whereby forms don’t just ‘change’, but change by always diverging from each other (remember, we are in the section on
‘Divergence of Character’).5 Whether as a result of historical accidents, then, or under the action of a specific ‘principle’, 6 the reality
of divergence pervades the history of life, defining its morphospace—its space-of-forms: an important concept, in the pages that follow—as an intrinsically
expanding one.
From a single common origin, to an immense variety of solutions: it is this incessant growing-apart of life forms that the branches of a morphological tree
capture with such intuitive force. ‘A tree can be viewed as a simplified description of a matrix of distances’, write Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza
in the methodological prelude to their History and Geography of Human Genes; and figure 29, with its mirror-like alignment of genetic
groups and linguistic families drifting away from each other (in a ‘correspondence [that] is remarkably high but not perfect’, as they note with aristocratic
aplomb), 7 makes clear what they mean: a tree is a way of sketching how far a certain language has moved from another one, or from their common
point of origin.
And if language evolves by diverging, why not literature too?
This study examined the responses of television viewers to the potential loss of their favorite television characters. A sample of 381 Israeli adults completed
questionnaires, including questions about their relationships with their favorite characters, how they would react if those characters were taken off the air, and
their attachment styles. Results showed that viewers expecting to lose their favorite characters anticipate negative reactions similar to those experienced after
the dissolution of social relationships. These reactions were related both to the intensity of the parasocial relationship
with the favorite character and to the viewers’ attachment style. Anxious-ambivalently attached respondents anticipated the most negative responses. The results
are discussed in light of their contribution to attachment research and as evidence of the similarity between parasocial
relationships and close social relationships.
Much of the so-called new experimental aesthetics is concerned with liking as a function of novelty/familiarity.
The mere-exposure hypothesis, suggesting that liking is the result of ‘mere repeated exposure’ of the individual to the stimulus, is critically discussed.
The view is then considered that, more generally, the relationship between novelty/familiarity and liking takes the form of an inverted U. Theories purporting
to explain this relationship are then briefly described. Next, our own experiments on letters, words and surnames, which show results consistent with the
inverted-U function are reported.
However, for a certain category of stimuli, where the preference-feedback effect is in evidence, the relationship between novelty/familiarity and liking is
more like a positive rectilinear one. This is well illustrated by our findings concerning preferences for Christian names.
This brings us to the topic of vogues. A survey of studies of aesthetic appreciation of music highlights, among other features, the presence of cycles of
fashion of varying periodicities.
The chapter ends up with some tentative general conclusions about aesthetic preferences in relation to novelty.
