Acerbi Alberto
School of Innovation Science, Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2016 Dec 15;10:636. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00636. eCollection 2016.
Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the developments of media in the digital age. I will first give a general presentation of the cultural evolution framework, and I will then introduce this more specific research program with two illustrative topics. The first topic concerns how cultural transmission biases, that is, simple heuristics such as "copy prestigious individuals" or "copy the majority," operate in the novel context of digital media. The existence of transmission biases is generally justified with their adaptivity in small-scale societies. How do they operate in an environment where, for example, prestigious individuals possess not-relevant skills, or popularity is explicitly quantified and advertised? The second aspect relates to fidelity of cultural transmission. Digitally-mediated interactions support cheap and immediate high-fidelity transmission, in opposition, for example, to oral traditions. How does this change the content that is more likely to spread? Overall, I suggest the usefulness of a "long view" to our contemporary digital environment, contextualized in cognitive science and cultural evolution theory, and I discuss how this perspective could help us to understand what is genuinely new and what is not.
如今，数字媒体广泛传播，其对广大人群行为的影响几乎不可低估。在这篇综述中，我提出文化进化理论，包括对人类行为的深入理解以及对建模和定量分析的方法论态度，为研究数字时代媒体的影响和发展提供了一个有用的框架。我将首先对文化进化框架进行总体介绍，然后通过两个示例主题引入这个更具体的研究项目。第一个主题涉及文化传播偏差，即诸如“模仿有声望的人”或“模仿多数人”等简单启发式方法，在数字媒体的新环境中是如何运作的。传播偏差的存在通常以其在小规模社会中的适应性来解释。在例如有声望的人拥有不相关技能，或者人气被明确量化和宣传的环境中，它们是如何运作的呢？第二个方面涉及文化传播的保真度。与口头传统相反，数字媒介互动支持廉价且即时的高保真传播。这如何改变更有可能传播的内容呢？总体而言，我认为以认知科学和文化进化理论为背景，用“长远视角”看待我们当代数字环境是有用的，并且我讨论了这种视角如何能帮助我们理解什么是真正新颖的，什么不是。
