Lerique Sébastien, Roth Camille
Center for Social Analysis and Mathematics, CNRS and EHESS.
Centre Marc Bloch Berlin e.V.
Cogn Sci. 2018 Jan;42(1):188-219. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12494. Epub 2017 Apr 10.
We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well-studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.
我们展示了一个将心理语言学与文化进化领域联系起来的实证案例研究，以检验引语进化过程中文化吸引子的存在。这类吸引子已被视作理解与个体认知相关的文化进化的一个有用概念，但其存在一直难以得到验证。我们聚焦于引语在从一个博客复制到另一个博客或媒体网站时的转变：通过用一些经过充分研究的词汇特征对单词进行编码，我们表明，引语中单词被替换的方式（a）与文化吸引子假说一致，（b）与已知的单词特征效应一致。特别是，已知在列表中更难回忆起的单词被替换的倾向更高，取而代之的是更易回忆起的单词。我们的结果支持这样一种假说，即文化吸引子可能源于个体在表征的解释和复制过程中的认知偏差的组合。
