Skip to Main Content
Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems
book

Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

by Paul K. Davis, Angela O'Mahony, Jonathan Pfautz
April 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
992 pages
31h 53m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

8 Dealing with Culture as Inherited Information

Luke J. Matthews

Behavioral and Policy Sciences, RAND Corporation, Boston, MA, 02116, USA

Galton's Problem as a Core Feature of Cultural Theory

Improving models for social behavior eventually will require dealing with culture theoretically and empirically and in the statistical models that link theory and evidence. Developing ways to meaningfully include culture could increase the validity and credibility of social‐behavioral modeling. Culture is theorized to be inherited information that influences beliefs and behaviors and that is acquired through social learning (Cavalli‐Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Laland and Kendal 2003; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Dean et al. 2014; Henrich 2015; Mesoudi et al. 2016). This conception of culture is accepted by nearly all researchers working today on culture who employ a generally scientific approach, by which I mean striving to operationalize measurements of culture and to test hypotheses about how it operates. Yes, most scientific cultural researchers also do a great deal of qualitative research that may be solely descriptive rather than oriented toward testing hypotheses, but they do not see this solely descriptive work as an end point for the scientific study of culture.

The idea that culture is socially inherited information in fact characterizes even Edward B. Tylor's first definition of culture: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Modeling and Visualization of Complex Systems and Enterprises: Explorations of Physical, Human, Economic, and Social Phenomena

Modeling and Visualization of Complex Systems and Enterprises: Explorations of Physical, Human, Economic, and Social Phenomena

William B. Rouse
Academic Press Library in Signal Processing

Academic Press Library in Signal Processing

Sergios Theodoridis, Rama Chellappa

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119484967Purchase book