Alex Mesoudi
Professor of Cultural Evolution
University of Exeter
Welcome! I am Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall, UK.
I study human cultural evolution. I am interested in how human culture evolved, and how culture itself evolves over time.
I use experiments to simulate cultural evolution in the lab. I get people to make and copy technological artifacts like arrowheads or handaxes, or solve problems resembling real-world challenges. The aim is to understand how psychological and social processes have shaped cultural change past and present.
I construct models of cultural evolution. These explore how individual decisions (e.g. when and from whom people learn) translate into population-level patterns of cultural change. I have modeled cumulative technological change, copycat suicides, and the effects of migration on cultural diversity.
I analyse big datasets to explain real world patterns of cultural evolution. Recent analyses have explored the cultural evolution of pop music, football tactics and nature documentary tweets.
You can read more on the Research page below, or view my Publications.
The human species has an extraordinary reliance on culture, i.e. the vast body of beliefs, knowledge and skills that we acquire from other individuals via social learning. While other species adapt to their environments primarily via genetic evolution, we adapt via cultural evolution. I am interested in how this process of cultural evolution works, its similarities and differences to genetic evolution, and how traditional social science findings and topics can be studied within an evolutionary framework.
Learning from others, aka 'social learning', lies at the heart of human culture. I have run several lab experiments examining how people learn from one another, who they learn from, when they learn from others rather than alone, and what they learn. Some studies use the 'transmission chain method', where stories or task solutions are passed along linear chains of participants like the game 'Telephone'. These have found, for example, that information about social relationships and interactions is transmitted better than non-social information. Other studies look at how people within fixed groups learn from one another over time. Often these experiments look at technological change, getting participants to design arrowheads, handaxes or other objects reflecting real-life human technology. Previous findings have shown that people prefer to learn from successful others, but often copy others less than they should do; and that causal understanding is often not necessary for improvements in technologies.
I have used theoretical models, primarily agent-based simulations, to explore how different learning dynamics - who copies what, from whom and when - might generate large-scale patterns of cultural evolution. Previous models have looked at beliefs in partible paternity (where children have more than one biological 'father'), copycat suicide, and how the costs of acquiring ever-accumulating knowledge slows down innovation in cumulative cultural evolution.
Ever since our species dispersed out of Africa, migration has been a constant fixture of Homo sapiens. 'Acculturation' describes the psychological and behavioural changes that occur as a result of migration. I have recently studied how acculturation affects the psychological characteristics of first and second generation British Bangladeshi migrants in London, as well as theoretical models of how acculturation and migration interact to shape cultural diversity over time. Lab experiments have mapped cross-cultural variation in social learning, showing higher rates of social learning in mainland China than in the West.
People often preferentialy learn from high-status, respected and knowledgeable individuals within their societies. This tendency is known as 'prestige-biased' social learning. A series of recent lab, field and online experiments have tested the extent to which people form prestige hierarchies in naturally-occurring human groups, and when people employ prestige-biased social learning.
The digital age has yielded big cultural datasets that can be used to quantitatively analyse patterns of real-life cultural evolution. Recent projects have analysed and explained large-scale, long-term change in pop music lyrics, football tactics and tweets related to the Netflix documentary Our Planet.
