Cross-border political competition.

Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders. This news and opinion are often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily, such as political parties, factions, or interest groups. But how does exposure to cross-border information affect the diffusion of ideas across national and ideological borders? Here, we develop a non-linear mathematical model for the cross-border spread of two ideologies.

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks 'knowledge synthesis', is poorly supported by 'theory', has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g.

Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection.

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants. While cultural evolutionary theory emphasises the importance of social learning to this process, experimental studies indicate that people's dominant response is to maintain their prior behaviour. In addition, while payoff-biased learning is crucial to Darwinian cultural evolution, learner behaviour is not always guided by variant payoffs.

Synchronising institutions and value systems: A model of opinion dynamics mediated by proportional representation.

Individuals increasingly participate in online platforms where they copy, share and form they opinions. Social interactions in these platforms are mediated by digital institutions, which dictate algorithms that in turn affect how users form and evolve their opinions. In this work, we examine the conditions under which convergence on shared opinions can be obtained in a social network where connected agents repeatedly update their normalised cardinal preferences (i.

Network Connectivity Dynamics, Cognitive Biases, and the Evolution of Cultural Diversity in Round-Robin Interactive Micro-Societies.

The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures. The temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, that is, the order in which individuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how, in a fully connected social network, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different cognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants.