This application addresses broad Challenge Area (01) Behavior, Behavioral Change, and Prevention and specific Challenge Topic 01-OD (OBSSR)-101* Tools for studying cultural phenomena. Population dynamic models of culture conceptualize culture as information distributed among individuals. To explain cultural change, these models account for the social transmission processes that cause some variants to spread and others to diminish. The Co-PI's and their collaborators have conducted empirical research on cultural variation and transmission mechanisms at two field sites, Yasawa Island, Fiji and Huatasani, Peru, for a number of years. So far these measurements have been based on experimental games, structured interviews, and behavior observation. Here we propose a two year project that will extend this work by developing a number of new tools for the study of cultural variation and transmission. These tools address three challenges. First, to better understand the mechanisms that allow for accurate transmission of cultural information, and in particular, whether subtle forms of teaching play an important role, we will generate a teaching ethogram that includes behaviors like gaze, gesture, and modified task structure. This will allow us to document the extent of teaching and determine whether more teaching is associated with more accurate cultural transmission. We will also modify the """"""""over- imitation"""""""" task used by psychologists to directly measure the relative importance of teaching and causal transparency in determining the accuracy of social learning. Second, we will use the implicit association test and a newly developed """"""""social category inference task"""""""" to study the effect of social categories on transmission. The first measures attitudinal biases without verbal report, while the second allows us to map how the attributes that define group membership affect the kinds of inferences that people make about group members. The IAT has been widely used in the laboratory, but we will modify so that it can be used to measure cultural variation in field settings. Finally, to measure cultural variation in mental representations that are not available through verbal self-report we will develop a new behaviorally based interview method, and apply this method to measure within population variation in food preparation techniques and the production of material culture. While the method involves a number of steps, the basic idea is to compare judgments of the adequacy of video-recorded performances with verbal descriptions of an adequate performance for the same task. Cultural beliefs about diet, exercise, and life-style have important impacts on health. The goal of this research project is to better understand why people come to have the beliefs that they do. To accomplish this, we will measure how people acquire cultural beliefs and how these beliefs are distributed in a two populations.
Cultural beliefs about diet, exercise, and life-style have important impacts on health. The goal of this research project is to better understand why people come to have the beliefs that they do. To accomplish this, we will measure how people acquire cultural beliefs and how these beliefs are distributed in a two populations.
| Moya, Cristina; Boyd, Robert (2015) Different selection pressures give rise to distinct ethnic phenomena : a functionalist framework with illustrations from the Peruvian Altiplano. Hum Nat 26:1-27 |
| Moya, Cristina; Boyd, Robert; Henrich, Joseph (2015) Reasoning About Cultural and Genetic Transmission: Developmental and Cross-Cultural Evidence From Peru, Fiji, and the United States on How People Make Inferences About Trait Transmission. Top Cogn Sci 7:595-610 |
| Moya, Cristina (2013) Evolved priors for ethnolinguistic categorization: A case study from the Quechua-Aymara boundary in the Peruvian Altiplano. Evol Hum Behav 34:265-272 |
