The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Oct 1;23(10):1067-73. doi: 10.1177/0956797612443371. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
How do psychological processes shape how culture evolves? We investigated how a cultural item's popularity is shaped by the recent popularity of other items with features in common. Specifically, using more than 100 years of first-names data, we examined how a name's popularity is influenced by the popularity of that name's component phonemes in other names in the previous year. Building on mere-exposure research, we found that names are more likely to become popular when similar names have been popular recently. These effects are nonlinear, however, and overpopularity hurts adoption. In addition, these effects vary with phoneme position. We demonstrate the causal impact of similarity on cultural success in a natural experiment using hurricane names. An exogenous shock to a phoneme's frequency, due to the presence of the phoneme in the names of prominent hurricanes, boosts the popularity of names that share that phoneme. Taken together, our results suggest how the similarity between cultural items affects how popular they become and how culture evolves more broadly.
心理过程如何塑造文化的演变？我们研究了文化项目的流行度如何受到具有共同特征的其他项目最近流行度的影响。具体来说，我们使用了 100 多年的名字数据，考察了一个名字的流行度如何受到前一年其他名字中该名字组成音素的流行度的影响。基于单纯接触研究，我们发现，当相似的名字最近很流行时，名字就更有可能变得流行。然而，这些影响是非线性的，过度流行会阻碍采用。此外，这些影响还随音素位置而变化。我们在一个使用飓风名字的自然实验中证明了相似性对文化成功的因果影响。由于音素出现在著名飓风中的名字中，音素的频率会受到外生冲击，这会提高具有该音素的名字的流行度。总之，我们的研究结果表明，文化项目之间的相似性如何影响它们的流行度，以及文化更广泛地演变。
