Cultural Dynamics with Bret Beheim
2025-11-04 13:00:00.000 +00:00

Here we are again for another episode. I'm David Pinsov. Who are you? I'm Dave Petrazuki. And this is uh Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologist. That's right. Uh keep listening. Enjoy. David, today we have uh uh uh we're talking to somebody in Germany. That's right. His name is Brett Beheim. He is from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Uh he is a brilliant thinker and scientist. Oh I have to interrupt you. It's the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, because there's tons of Max Planck Institutes. Yes, the one in Leipzig. How it evolves, how it spreads, how it diffuses, which is one of the things we talk about.

Uh we talk about cultural distance, how we can actually quantify how different one cultural is from another and how that affects the way we we interact with people, whether we're more likely to help or less likely to help someone from a distant culture. Um, what else did we talk about, Dave? How genes are smooth and culture is crunchy, which is a really nice evocative image. Brett has an amazing whiteboard uh during this interview. So if you're not watching on a visual format, go check out our YouTube video for a second. And uh we even talk about um things like do you wait at a stop sign when nobody's around or the game of go. Like lots of fun, wonderful things to talk about with Brett. The the two hours went by so quick.

Yeah. Had an absolute blast talking to Brett. Uh it was a really fun conversation. I think you'll have a fun time listening to it. Okay. Enjoy. All right. Um today we have Brett Beheim, who is it's nighttime in Germany, but because of the latitude in Germany in Leipzig, uh it's it's like, what is it, nine? Uh what time is it there? It is six. Six. We'll edit that out. Uh I didn't look at the clock. Um yeah, it's six o'clock at night. Yeah, but um, but it's almost never uh actually nighttime that latitude um because of the we're gonna cut all this up because it's like Yukon latitude, because I remember I moved to Berlin and during the summer it's always a little bit light out, and I looked it up and

technically it's an nautical twilight, And it's because the latitude is so high that it never gets completely dark, which is kind of great in the summer. You know, like the days are really long. Do you like that, Brett? Or do you have to like, does it affect your sleeping? No, not at all. I mean, as you probably know, the shutters tend to be really good here. So uh you can kind of get a blackout in your in your uh in your room. Uh So yeah, I I like it quite a bit actually. For those of for those who are listening and not watching, um Brett we're gonna describe a scene for you here. Brett Brett is is sitting in front of a chalkboard full of mathematical equations and graphs. It looks like we're talking it looks like he's working on the Manhattan Project.

Brett Brett, what what is on that trunk for boy. Uh that that is from a discussion earlier. Well how much time do we have? Yeah. So start from the top left. Okay. Yeah, hold on. Can I move the camera to you know pull it closer? No, we were we were working on something earlier today and uh uh uh sort of stepping through uh a particular technique uh that's used called network-based diffusion analysis. Um and it has a uh uh I think a very uh nice literature in animal behavior, uh looking at cultural diffusion processes inside uh uh many animal societies. And we're working on a project right now. Yeah. So what is cultural diffusion? What is network diffusion? What are what are we talking about? Uh so if you're looking at some kind of a measurable quantifiable

cultural thing, uh give some concrete examples canoe design, right? Yeah, whether whether the well specifically whether the canoe has a certain motif or it's you know employs like a a a specific feature like an outrigger. Um if uh an animal is able to open a particular piece of food that's kind of hard to open using a specific technique. Um coconuts are really hard to open. Yeah, yeah. Um I spent like two hours once on a beach trying to hit it with rocks and there's some anyway. Christina can tell you about that. Yeah, so there's there's an art to it, right? And you know sometimes there's alternative solutions to the same problem. Um so one of the starting places for a lot of this work is to imagine that you can

uh discretize this. You can say whether the technique was present or absent, or the technology, the item, uh the marker, the variance was present or absent in a particular uh observation. Um and then the uh the analysis for for looking at a diffusion process uh might concentrate on the timing of different individuals in a population showing that particular technique or incorporating that particular uh uh item or or motif uh into their repertoire. Um and then you put that into like a time series and you can see it spreading through the population somehow. And so, I mean, this works really well in uh experimental setups with animals. Like if you intentionally, you know, give them a problem that requires coming up with

a very discrete and obvious solution, like you know, opening a puzzle box in a certain way, um, then mapping how that spreads among individuals in the population becomes the basis for the analysis. Like, how do we how do we describe that process? Like, what is the speed at which it goes? Um, can we figure out how specific individuals might be influencing other individuals in the acquisition? Um and that's where the the board That's where all the math comes from. So exactly. So it's it's basically so you're referring to it as diffusion because you're drawing an analogy, presumably, from the diffusion, say, of putting a bit of creamer in a and some coffee and the cream will slowly diffuse and blend with the coffee.

If you pump cold air into a room, the cold air and the warmer will will gradually you know the cold air will diffuse. Um if you cough during a pandemic, the pandemic will spread in the what you're interested in is the cultural version of that. So if I start tap dancing, how quickly are people going to imitate me and start tapping? Not quickly at all, David. No. No. Uh you're insulting me too. Actually, I don't know. It's an empirical question. Brett can record and we can actually measure this. Yeah, stuff stuff can uh die out too if they're not as popular as they used to be in the nineteen twenties. I'll edit that out. I'm sorry. Are are you studying how cultural diffusion can die out as well as spread?

And what what are the factors that oh con that's the that's the whole uh uh you know the whole story basically is what's the you know what's the story for the rise and fall of particular trends um over uh long periods of time, multi-generational time spans? You know, do we see interesting changes in people's cultural repertoires or beliefs? Um but then also things that occur very quickly. Uh, you know, as we see the arrival of new technology, I mean, uh, I think all of us are sort of grappling with uh incorporating things like uh LLMs into our repertoires right now. Like what's the right way to sort of, you know, have this in the classroom or have this in the, you know, the workplace? Uh this is not a multi-generational process, like this is happening right now to everyone

simultaneously. Uh just like, you know, I mean I remember when cell phones first became a thing. That was amazing. It's like I could, you know, call my parents and I I wasn't home uh and I didn't have to find like a payphone or something. Um smartphones too. That's another one I think that you know is quite quite culturally significant and is a great motivating example, you know, how rapidly things have changed since then. Like I I remember um if you watch this video of uh I think it was the first um debut of the iPhone back in like 2006 or something. Um with Steve Jobs. Crazy recently. Exactly, right? And you you watch this video, you know, and uh at the time, you know, the the like cutting edge was like Blackberries, right?

These sort of very large uh brick like phones that had keypad keypads on them, like physical buttons. And it was like a miniature, miniature keyboard. I mean, like, I don't know who yeah, it was like it was like left in the dryer, and it was just lunked down. Yeah. And there was this sort of a push to be like, well, maybe we can make the keyboard like fold open, and then you can have this like full size keyboard that you're tapping on, uh, or there's like all sorts of complicated sliding gimmicks. Um and then at like the Mac developer conference, uh Steve Jobs, you know, famously is pulling out this tiny little device. Um and we're looking at, you know, something now that is just ubiquitous worldwide.

Like, you know, so many people engage with this technology, and you can see basically when it first really became visible. I mean, it's incredible. Like you watch this and he's, you know, he's got this little gizmo. Actually, can I show it to you? I have I have like please. I wonder if I have Russia. Um Maybe I don't. You're gonna have to edit this out too. That's okay. Yeah, I have it somewhere, but we're giving you a better view of the board. Um oh here it is. Yeah, okay. So uh check this out. I got this in my technology museum here. So there it is. Um wow. And uh he's up there holding this device. That's the first iPhone. Uh technically it's an iPod, but that was when they were switching the iPods to be looking

like uh iPhones. It's the same form factor, I think. Okay, yeah. Um and a deck of cards. Yeah, right. And it's you know, compared to modern phones, it's this tiny little thing, too. Um but he's showing you know all these things you can do with it. Like they've you know, they ordered pizza live on stage for everybody, and he's showing all these different apps, and people are like amazed. It's like, oh, I can open up the music app now and you know and play it like an iPod. And he's like, Oh, you know, I I really should like you know go to a new song. How do I do that? And he flicks his finger on the screen, and it has that sort of inertial scrolling mechanic that we use every day, and the audience gasps at watching this.

It's really remarkable to see, you know, something that is such a you know basic part of our daily lives now uh being shockingly new and amazing to people uh not even two decades ago. Yeah. Um so that that's you know, that's a a a big part, I think, of of what I'm interested to is I mean, you have a lot of very slow cultural change processes that you know you can look at over the course of many generations, but you also have very rapid diffusion type processes. Um and David, to your point, I think that the um the reason that we use the you know the the phrase diffusion for that, I mean, of course, there's, you know, there's a there's a lot of literature on this, you know, in in many different um social

sciences. Um, like there's the famous Rogers book, The The Diffusion of Innovations. Um, but uh I think that the primary reason why the uh analogy is so firm is because there's a lot of similar models for describing these processes. There's sort of these uh symmetries in the way that we describe these different physical systems. You know, you got physical stuff like the diffusion of um heat uh uh in a in a in a physical uh medium of some kind, like a block of iron. Um, and you've got the diffusion of genes in a population, uh, which I think is the immediate place where diffusion uh modeling comes in uh to cultural uh topics. And then you have epidemiological work, right, too, which is looking at the spread of

particular contagions. And a lot of the math is very similar, if not exactly the same, which is really neat that you can effectively model so many different processes, phenomena, using these kinds of toy models that capture a particular phenomenon. And so that I think is is really one of the cool sort of starting places. Does it say what are the sort of symmetries that we can see in different topics or different study systems? And what does that help us maybe understand the topic a little bit more? Yeah. What when I looked at your website, I looked, uh I'm looking right now at what your working papers are, which means like the most recent ones. And there's two. One is called the development of risk attitudes in their cultural transmission.

And the second one is called a model of coronary artherosclerosis. I can't say that can you say yeah artherosclerosis. Yes, thank you. Um uh and that to me is like so cool because it's sort of like on your website it would be the equivalent of like studying I'm studying you know um um Like a galaxy and bicycle tires. You know, like if you don't take a scientific approach, like what does a galaxy and a bicycle tire have in common? Nothing. And I think one of the things that's like magical about science is that you can have a tool or a way of looking at a galaxy that's the same way of thinking about a bicycle tire. And I think one of the amazing things for me in whenever I see you give a talk, um is that uh it's this taking this approach that's sort of for me, as

like a psychologist or like somebody who just sort of naively thinks about, like, well, yeah, galaxies and bike tires are different. Um, there are all these tools in the evolutionary behavioral sciences for adopting more stringent models. And maybe we can talk about why that is, and maybe a little bit about like the backstory. Because so far we've talked a lot about psychology and individual behavior and methodological individualism, but we haven't really talked about why would you want to model these things precisely? But yeah, I just like I want to make the comment that like it's so obvious and cool. Um, you know, I think there's different kinds of sciences. One is sort of like, you know, I study snakes, and this is this snake, this is another

snake, and that's cool because snakes are cool. But there's another version of science where you unite something like a bicycle tire and a galaxy. And I think what you're doing is sort of like that. It's sort of a superpower. Thank you. Yeah. Um so uh so can we get a little bit into then uh why do we want a precise model and what the heck does evolution have to do with any of this? Oh, that's a great question. Um well uh as you may have talked about in the past, I don't know. Um, you know, evolution as a topic, of course, didn't start as a like a mathematical field, right? I I don't think like Charles Darwin was doing any math, you know, in his various work, at least not very formal math. Simultaneously, there was work being done, you know, by Gregor Mendel and his successors

that was very quantitative, and it was trying to carefully measure uh inheritance um in in ways that you know lend themselves to uh statistical analysis. But it took a while for those two branches, I think, to intersect. It wasn't until like the early 20th century where you really had a lot of work actually uniting the two. I mean, that's what we refer to as the modern synthesis, right? Was the initial kind of wave of mathematical models that were taking Darwinian ideas and coupling them with what we knew about Mendelian inheritance and showing that they were completely compatible, which I think was actually a source of controversy in the late 1800s, was this view that Darwinian evolution uh requires things to be a little smoother than they are with Mendel's

discrete inheritance mechanisms. And so these are incompatible frameworks. And people like Ronald Fisher and Sewell Wright show up and they're like, well, actually, uh you can make mathematical models that show that account for the kinds of you know uh uh distributions of diversity we see using discrete inheritance mechanisms. Um and I mean that it was so successful that we don't even really consciously think about that now. I think that these at one point were almost like rival paradigms for understanding the origin of life. Um and uh the modeling in that case did a lot of the heavy lifting, I think. It wasn't necessarily, I mean, these were very forceful personalities as well. If you know the history of statistics, you know, Ronald Fisher and Sewell Wright.

Um But uh I think that what really drove home the uh the value of it was that we had these models we could fall back on and use them as a starting place to think about process. Um and uh that's I think very rhetorically useful, like to sort of say, well, we're not just you know claiming that these are the different forces we see in the evolutionary process. We're giving you examples of how we think they might work in very controlled, sort of uh idealized circumstances. And then we're sort of imagining how each one of them relate to each other, how you might turn one on, turn it off. If you turn them all off, you get like you know, Harvey Weinberg equilibrium, right? Um and that is what is Harvey Weinberg you could be able to do.

Oh man, I I don't know if I can I don't know if I can give that a good addition. New board, new board, new porn. Yeah, exactly. But the uh book just swipe the board. Um so uh the the question here, I think, uh from what I remember from Population Genetics is um what happens if you turn off every force that we think of as kind of a directional force in acting on a population of genes. So there's no selection. So this idea of, you know, like as you said, we have discrete genes sort of underlying traits. And there's just sort of a one-to-one mapping, which we talked about as sort of the phenotypic gambit before, and some assumption about how they combine and sort of how they get inherited. And it can be simplified, but still simplified enough to be sort of accurate, right?

Like eye color or some any trait, right? And then um and then the forces are if you just sort of let the model run, there's ideas about, well, some of the traits are favored more than others by the environment, for example, but the and that's an example of a force. So to what extent does the environment favor, for example, you know, like having photosynthesis if you're a plant versus not, you know. And so like you could just model that and say, does photosynthesis sort of diffuse throughout the population over time? So sorry, just to give that sort of background. Yeah, that's exactly it. And uh you could think of migration as a force if there's like a systematic movement of organisms between you know, islands is the classic uh sort of dynamic here.

Like if you've got a mainland and you've got islands, there's sort of a regular flow rate that's occurring between each uh place. Um drift is also a force. This is something that uh is maybe not as talked about in evolutionary models, but some people have suggested that it's it's quite a powerful force actually for understanding how um distributions change over time, you know, if they're genetic distributions or behavioral distributions, cultural traits. And that's uh in the context of the equilibrium model, uh, it's uh a powerful force when you have small populations. Um so individual stochastic events can really shift things around. But if you have a very, very large population, then you know uh Laval's numbers

tends to move things towards averages. Uh and so if you have stochastic events, they're occurring at such a small rate, they're not really modifying the distribution meaningfully. I mean, you know, an infinitely sized population has no drift, basically. Um, and so that's like all the idealized circumstances. Like you're just going through it and you're like, okay, so imagine a population where there's, you know, there's no environmental favoring of specific uh variants in the population. Uh, there's no drift at all because it's infinitely sized, there's no migration, uh, and there's um There's no mutation either. So there's no spontaneous change of one type into another type. I think that's all of them.

I'm not sure. But that's a starting place. We're saying, okay, so we switched off all the different forces that could be acting. So then we would expect the population to be at equilibrium. Like it's not going to change over the course of time. But then, I mean, that's sort of a null condition, right? Then the question is, okay, like when we do see a change, can we switch on one force or the other in the modeling? And does it look kind of like what we're seeing in real life? Like in terms of the rate at which it's happening? Does the uh process of change kind of look like an R curve when you're graphing it over time? Or does it look more like an S curve is like a classic differentiation of the two?

Um R curves are more consistent with like mutation, uh, and S curves are um uh I mean, the the classic selection signal, I think, is looking at like an S curve, a selective sweep. So it's basically it's similar to the idea of in the same way like gravity. If you have a model of sort of how gravity works, and then you add something like a coefficient of drag, and then you like measure leaf leaves falling. Like that was an example I used in an earlier episode. And so you can have a model of sort of, well, here's how the leaves are actually falling outside my window. What's the model look like when we only have gravity? What's the model look like when there's only coefficient of drag? What's the what does the model do when we combine both?

And then how does that compare to the actually how the leaves fall? And what that allows you to do is ask the question: we have these models of this complicated thing, like how something behaves, and we're trying to capture um something more sophisticated than just down, right? Like if we want to have a model of like how does a leaf fall enough to like predict it or recreate it or whatever, then you need it better than just like an arrow down, right? Um maybe. And so the and that's the same thing with human behavior or traits of an organism, right? Like that's the idea that there's this sort of revolution in part of science, which is treating behavior or a trait. Uh and obviously there's differences between like, you know, hair color versus like what

kind of music I listen to, whether like or the design of a canoe. But as you said, it's this principle of like galaxies and bike tires. There's there's a level at which the modeling at least can capture the changes over time. And that's the thing that like unifies what you're looking at. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Yeah. It's crazy. So uh what is cultural distance? Uh well yeah, how how long how much time do we have? Uh Brett lives in Germany, he's gonna tell you all kinds of anecdotes about cultural. Yeah, exactly. Um this is a uh this is a particular concept that has been interesting to a number of scholars in cultural evolution recently. Um and so there's been a lot of modeling effort directed at this.

Um the basic idea is that we are trying to come up with some kind of a quantification for uh kind of our sentiment that you know two um two cultures or two uh sets of norms uh are more similar to each other than uh uh a third that you're comparing them against um similar to what that means the plant thing right like just in the same way you can say like two plants now have photosynthesis and the third didn't that's right it's kind of capturing that but applying it to you now culture right that's right and just in concrete example you might intuitively think that America and the UK are closer to each other culturally than America is to China. Yeah, that's exactly the comparison. I used that that that those three actually in a recently.

And then there's just, you know, uh various ways to try to quantify that somehow. Um so uh there's this particular data set called the World Values Survey, uh, which has been um a major focus for attention uh among uh sociologists uh for uh basically giving us uh a large number of questions that uh are asked around the world uh about uh you know large variety of different topics uh relating to people's values. And then uh there's a bunch of algorithms that people use. They they they calculate distance measures and they say these two places are more similar than these two places or somebody from this country is more similar to to somebody from this other country. I mean, this isn't just cultural evolution.

Uh, sort of our uh uh contribution, the evolutionary sciences, I think, is to try to connect this um a little more formally to other kinds of distance measures in biology. Um, but outside of evolutionary theory, there's also a large number of different um distance measures that people have used or calculated. Um What what they mean exactly is kind of also a big issue. Like when you say, you know, I think, you know, intuitively that um, you know, two societies or two people might have similar cultural dispositions. Um, you know, okay, maybe you can quantify that somehow, but then, you know, what does that actually do for us? Like, why why would you want to know that? Uh and um I mean, I think it can go a lot of different ways at that point.

Like, you know, people have used cultural compatibility as a uh, you know, like in the popular uh discourse as a a sort of a flashpoint for a lot of controversial opinions. Um I think you can flip it around and also think about this in terms of complementary skill sets or complementary uh interactive possibilities. I mean, one of the things we think of as a, you know, is as the basis for a lot of economic exchange is having comparative advantage. And if you have two different, you know, quote unquote skill sets or norms or something like that, it could be that they actually are quite uh beneficial when they interact with each other. So, I mean, it's not, I I think it's it's not a very well developed topic.

That would be my general assessment of it, is that there's a lot of interest in trying to come up with quantifications of cultural distance. Um and I think that you can map those on to lots of interesting um uh predictions about things like how people will behave in cooperative, uh uh cooperative experiments, for example. Um but uh what what would you what would you predict there? Well I wouldn't predict anything. I mean I'm not uh I'm not actually publishing on this very much but uh there was um some work recently on using a measure called cultural FST to predict uh willingness to cooperate in um I believe they were in uh vignettes that resembled like a uh uh some kind of prisoner's dilemma type interaction, uh, where there was the

possibility of giving an altruistic resource to somebody else. Um and prisoner's dilemma just uh because I don't think we mentioned this before, believe it or not, um, would be it's just the prisoner's dilemma of like both people are caught, they're interrogated by the police and they're interrogated separately. And uh if both of them stay quiet, they both are well off, right? But if one of them rats on the other, the one who rats is well off, and the one who's sort of the who doesn't rat but gets ratted on is sort of the sucker's payoff. And so it's sort of a distribution of where it benefits you to cooperate, but there's also a temptation to defect on the other. But if you both defect, you're both screwed.

And so it's just mirroring the prisoner's dilemma as that toy example fits for a lot of things where it's sort of like, you know, um like parenting parenting off effort where like, you know, if one parent does everything and you're pl going off and doing fun things, um, then uh your kid's okay. But if you both go off and do fun things, your kid's not taken care of. So there's just lots of things in life that have that structure. Sorry to interrupt, but yeah. No worries. And and the and the key thing here is the ordering of the payoff. So for me, the best outcome is if I defect and you cooperate. Ha ha ha, I got one over on you. Uh the second best outcome is if we both cooperate. Uh the third best outcome is if we both defect.

And then the worst outcome for me is if uh you defect while I cooperate. And so and and so that is the the the nature of the of the game. Yes, the suckers pay off is the would be the the worst outcome. So anyway, now that we know the prisoner's dilemma, continue with with what you were saying. Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking about this paper. Um, I think that the first author is Hanley, uh, and Sarah Matthew is the second author. Um and they were doing in a little bit, yeah. Or scheduling Sarah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, then maybe I shouldn't talk about it. No, no, no, go for it. Every guest we've had, we've been like, Well, I didn't get to X, Y, and Z. So yeah. Right. Well, uh, they were doing a study uh working with the field population that that that she's

worked with for some time now. Uh I think the Turkana. Um and uh the Turkana are kind of notable for having quite a bit of violence uh in uh lots of cattle raiding taking place, um uh both within the Turkana and also between Turkana and uh neighboring ethnic groups. Um and they were very interested in seeing how people would behave um, or at least they would say they would behave in these uh vignette circumstances where they're asked to provide aid to um uh to some hypothetical person that you know may be part of uh uh of an in-group or maybe part of an out-group, uh, as measured by the uh cultural distance measure. And their basic argument is that this measure itself is highly predictive of people's cooperativeness in these kinds of vignette circumstances, where they're being

asked to provide a resource with no possibility really of return on that resource. So it's it's kind of like a prisoner's dilemma. It has that kind of altruistic vibe to it. And uh they found a really strong effect That they're assessing on people and they're uh using uh kind of a a different battery of questions asking people about um uh uh a different set of topics. So so the the the dependent measure here was not cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma, correct? It w it was the the willingness to altruistically benefit the the target uh without any obvious return benefit. Is that is that correct? Uh that's right. Yeah. So it wasn't exactly a prisoner's dilemma where it's simultaneous choice, you know, and

then you benefit or or or or Aaron Powell So here the result is um if we're more culturally distant, I'm less likely to altruistically help you uh without any kind of expectation of of a return benefit. Um and so I would expect that result to be highly con uh conditional on the pat on that particular game where I help you uh just out of the goodness of my heart. Um, there could be other instances where, say, we're trading, and maybe um your cultural distance might increase the likelihood that I want to trade with you because you have different stuff and you do different things and you have a comparative advantage uh uh in some skills rather than others. So I would so um uh has there been work on that or or or is it yeah um uh so my colleague

Ann Piser actually, this is one of the things she focuses on the most is um long distance interactions between individuals who aren't part of the same ethnic group potentially as a desired outcome, like you know, people consciously pursuing uh long-distance ties because they have exactly, as you say, uh the potential for providing unique resources or unique interactive uh abilities. And I think that, you know, it kind of works as a nice complement to uh the sort of altruism work, uh, where you know it really does depend on the interaction structures, uh, the kinds of games people are playing. In some circumstances, you can see cultural uh distance, you know, big cultural distances is like a big barrier for getting people organized.

Uh but in a different circumstance, you know, cultural distance could also indicate a lot of potential for mutually beneficial exchange, because you have division of labor, you have uh comparative advantage, you have all these nice things that uh uh tend to that humans tend to uh figure out how to do pretty well, actually. Uh and uh that you know that's sort of my interest, is thinking about how the game structures affect our interpretations of things like cultural distance. Um, you know, how in some circumstances it might seem like it's a bad thing, in other circumstances uh it could potentially be uh highly advantageous to have a you know a lot of distance, cultural distance between people in the same uh same team.

So w why do you think that is? So so why is it that um if you're culturally distant from me, I'm less likely to just help you out of the goodness of my heart? But if you're more culturally distant than me, I might be more interested in trading with you uh to get some of the stuff you have for for the stuff that I have. So wha what explains that difference in in in my in my behaviors there? What what do you think is going on psychologically? Psychologically, oh man. I I couldn't even hazard a guess actually. I mean that's sort of outside my wheelhouse. I would I would much rather uh uh ask that to Dave uh given your work in in in group structuring uh I mean it's uh i i it it certainly seems like

it's an important force, right? That's my my general understanding from reading this literature is that um humans are really groupy. Um it's a it's a major structuring process in our behavior and understanding, you know, uh how things like opinions form uh is heavily influenced by uh our group affiliations. Um but uh yeah, I couldn't I couldn't uh go further than that in terms of speculation, to be honest. Me, me neither, actually. So but but actually that answer brings up one other question or one other thing to say, which is like, you know, one thing about uh our science is everybody's sort of doing a different job. And um, you know, one of the things that uh we've talked to a lot of anthropologists on and

I always talk about like as an experimental psychologist, you know, I can control the variables that I show to participants. And I can have a really good idea about like what's the software inside the mind, you know, that's causing it, you know, so like I can really experimentally control like what I show people, what they remember, what they respond. I can even measure like the timing. But what I don't, what I can't do is like measure real world stuff, right? So I have to sort of like recapture real world dynamics in the lab. And it's sort of lame, like, you know, on the computer. And so I always want to talk to anthropologists to sort of keep me honest. And it sounds like, you know, in addition to being in part anthropologist,

it's also there, it's a similar thing of, you know, psychology is interested in psychology, like the individual like wiring in the brain. And so, like, this question of like, why would we care about um uh helping people altruistically who are closer to us but trading more distantly? But we can't even ask that question if we don't know that that's actually what's happening, right? Out in the real world. So it's sort of like the data that we actually have to like collect to know even what question to even ask is part of like this team effort, right? And so it sounds like one of the things you're doing is in the old days, our ability to sort of describe behavior was sort of like just write down some stuff people do.

And it wasn't very mathematical and it wasn't very precise. Um, And the problem was you could write down the same behavior in different ways, and it wasn't always clear it was true. Sort of a replication crisis of just documenting what are the things we even have to explain. And so the way I think about it, and you can tell me if this is correct, is that you and like the people you work with are sort of in a wave of science where you are sort of keeping all the rest of us honest by coming up with better ways to quantify and measure real-world like phenomena, right? And so it's sort of you're developing a toolkit for the rest of us to use and for us to be more confident in like we can be sure that this thing is actually happening.

Is that sort of fair? Uh yeah, I think so. Um I mean the the way I think about it is a little different. That uh I mean there's just too much to observe, like in a given empirical circumstance. Like there's just an infinite number of details that could be potentially recorded. Um and one of the values of having theory or sort of formal theory is that it focuses things a bit and says, well, some details might be irrelevant for a particular question, uh, even though they might seem like they might be important, uh, other details might be really important. And so you should focus in on those. Uh and I think that there's kind of this back and forth, and as a result, like we get um, you know, theoretical, theoretical guidance for looking, you know, in the sea of infinite

observation possibilities to get data. Uh, the data is interesting. It it builds on the theory and motivates new theory. And then the theory goes back and you know sharpens the focus a little bit empirically. Yeah. And a good example might be like, and I don't know what the state of the art is, but when we talk to Chris von Ruden, we talked about like warfare and rates of conflict. And you could have a naive view, which is sort of like, well, warfare is a consequence of like how belligerent people are. And there's just sort of like sometimes people are grumpy and other times not. But then there's also like evidence that it's also uh what what correlates or tracks with uh conflict is also the harshness, for example, of the circumstances for

like having enough stuff. So if you're agrarian climate, and like if if climate becomes bad and inhospitable to having enough stuff, food, for example, then conflict goes up. And so one model, which is sort of just like based on just sort of random, like, do people talk about conflict, is con contrasted with a model that incorporates like, you know, resource scarcity, but then you need a model of resource scarcity and a way to quantify that. So you can actually test between those two models, right? Mm-hmm. Um I mean my my intuition as as a psychologist for what's going on there is uh again, just to bring it back to the um altruism toward culturally distant outgroups being low, but exchange with culturally distant outgroups in some cases being

high, is that uh the selection pressures that gave rise to altruism in the first place um usually come from the expectation that the altruism will lead to a long-term mutually beneficial cooperative relationship. Right. So if I am, you know, helping people, providing a large benefit to them at low cost to myself, the odds that that benefit will return to me at some point, maybe they'll reciprocate. Maybe someone will see me helping them and view me as a good cooperative partner and be more likely to help me. These kinds of return benefits are likely going to be higher if I if I deliver them to someone who is culturally similar to me. If I'm in a different culture from someone, if I help that person, it's pretty pretty low

likely that they're going to come back and reciprocate at some point. Or because we're so culturally distant, the probability that I'm going to form a mutually beneficial relationship with the person I'm helping is just so low. Just because it's just so hard for us to have a mutually beneficial relationship. If we speak a different language, that's going to be a huge barrier to that. So I think perhaps some part of the mind is estimating the likelihood that this act of helping will result in a long-term mutually beneficial relationship that will make the altruism worth it, that will make the altruism pay off. And so that might be shaping the low willingness to help as a result of cultural distance.

But if the cooperation is already established and there already is an exchange relationship and you can already be confident that uh uh giving that person something is going to result in something beneficial coming back to you, well then all that goes out the window and you can just uh ask the question of how valuable is their stuff uh to me, uh how how valuable is my stuff to them, and so forth. And so that that I think might be explaining what's going on. Do you do you buy that story? Um yes and no. Um I think that the the the thing I would add to it is uh that it's often the case that we don't know this kind of thing. Like we we don't know how uh how likely we are to see a return on a particular interaction.

Uh and that constraint is itself important, like how people get around that constraint or how they use uh information around them to try to fill in the gaps that they that they have. Um so I mean that's uh I would say probably one of the most interesting things about cultural evolution as a as a subfield is that one of the main focuses is how do individuals uh or how do organisms figure out things that they would need to know that do those kinds of calculations. How do they know how variable the environment is? That itself is actually really hard because if it's a really variable environment, then you might not have many examples around to teach that to you because they're all dead. And so it's now it becomes like an information problem, right?

Is you know, given the information that I have available, you know, what kind of cognition would you expect to develop that's trying to basically mine information out of the, you know, the social and physical milieu to try to figure that stuff out? Like, can I find examples? You know, so I think in the in the example you just described, David, um, it would be very powerful to have examples that you can look at of uh of interactions that then later led to a payoff that maybe wasn't obvious initially. Um, you know, that that would be information that you might imagine an organism would would add to their own understanding to basically learn the game they're in, right? As as they're playing it. I think that's maybe one way to phrase a lot of these problems is that you you don't know

the rules, uh, you don't really know what the payoffs are going to be. Um, you might not even have any preferences. Like this is the other thing I think that's really neat about um looking at the variation between different subfields uh is that um it's not obvious in some circumstances where the preferences come from. Like cause they're on top. I mean, like would you prefer an Android or an Apple? Like, I don't know. Like, I mean, that's not something that you could easily map into the same kind of preference psychology that you would something else. And so how the preference itself develops, like getting like an endogenous theory of preferences, as they call it in economics, is also neat because it's sort of layers on top,

it's sort of layers upon layers. Like you might imagine modeling the dynamics of the preference acquisition or the dynamics of learning about how risky your environment actually is. And then you model the behavior of the organism conditional on their understanding based on what they've learned. And it may very well play out exactly as you described. Like if they're if they're starting to pick up, you know, that uh I mean, there's this famous quote now I'm thinking of from uh uh Paul Samuelson, who's uh uh old school economist from the mid mid-20th century. Um And he wrote a very famous series of textbooks on economics. And there was this quote I remember from him that was something like I don't care which

politicians are in office so long as I get to write the textbooks. And I mean, the basic premise is that, you know, thinking about market interactions is often quite counterintuitive. And you kind of have to learn about market interactions to participate in a market economy. And so we see things like, oh, you know, the possibility for mutually beneficial interactions, but you know, that might not be obvious to somebody without a little bit of cultural exposure to that. And I think that part gets really interesting, like how people come to understand the possibilities in a particular interaction. Like, is you know, am I am I approaching this particular interaction thinking about it like, you know, I might a prison dilemma.

Or, you know, my I I'm I'm totally showing my cards here. When I was in college, I I remember reading Non Zero by Robert Wright and just being like, oh this is amazing. You know, like just uh the way that you understand a particular interaction having a big impact on uh potentially the way that you that you carry yourself or conduct yourself. Yeah. Can can and just to make it concrete, like one example might be like the level of trust in a culture. So for example, like let's say that there's two people in a culture and they detect some cultural distance from each other and therefore don't cooperate. And maybe uh objectively they would be better off if they did cooperate. And so, for example, imagine another culture where you have that same distance, but

for whatever reason, and we'll just pause that for a second, there's like something like sports. And even though they have the same cultural distance, they both like the same sports team. And that causes them to override the evolved psychology preference they would have had in the other scenario, and they therefore cooperate. And so these are two hypothetical cultures where in it's the same distance the agents are from each other, but in one case um they cooperate and when they don't. Does one do better? And in some sense, then is it that the culture that has the sports team that sort of cultural uh trait or phenotype sort of would outcompete one where there aren't sports teams because it leads the evolved psychology to produce cooperation.

Now that's a made-up scenario, but is that that would be like the kind of thing that this is sort of getting at is how do you take an evolved psychology that's sort of static in the sense of its underlying design? But then you get all these multiple either through drift or cultural inheritance or whatever, variable possible things that are thrown at the evolved psychology, like do you want to cooperate this person versus do you want to cooperate this person who like likes you know Hirtha Berlin Soccer Club, you know, like you do, right? Those those are two different worlds. And you can model those things. And then in some sense, it's asking the question of well, why do certain cultural traits

persist and are some of them persisting because, for example, they affect cooperation. Is that sort of fair? Yeah, I uh one thing I would add to that, which I think is maybe more troubling about the topic of cultural similarity, is that um the calculation that you get depends heavily on the questions that you're using for for measuring cultural similarity. I mean, it's not like there's a fundamental unit that is called the cultural similarity between people from the UK and and Americans or people from Germany and France. I mean you're you're talking about a battery of questions that are asked in like a particular survey uh and then running calculations on that domain in the way that the questions are structured.

Um is that consistent if you would ask a different set of questions or if the qu I mean like you know as you're framing it with this particular uh problem, Um depending on the domain, you might find a lot more affinity than in another domain. And it might matter a lot. Like so people I mean, basically if anything can come out of this conversation, I would say that this is a this is not uh something that has guarantees on the tin, you know, in as a topic. Like it's not something you can readily translate into any kind of policy uh, or you know, even apply it necessarily in in you know very casual circumstances, like obviously this way or that way. Yeah. Um so uh I mean it's it's useful to think about in specific circumstances.

What like what you know, how might you organize uh, you know, things like a cooperative or uh coordination task given a particular institutional environment? and how might you know cultural distance help us understand how that's going to play out? Um, but uh you add in all these other factors, like you know, uh some shared affinity for a sports team, or you know, the the the the interaction itself is in a totally different context than the way that you know the quote unquote cultural similarity scores are being assessed. Um uh all of that I think adds way too many complications. And uh I don't think I don't think there's any obvious uh uh applications for it in that kind of uh in that kind of way.

Yeah, I think like you have to have a dialogue with the psychologist, and just to do an analogy, you can say like was a whale more similar to a cow or a fish? And like it's a meaningless question because it means like similarity along which dimension. And if you take like a unidimensional similarity, you know, like well, maybe for swimming yeah like the whales more similar to the fish but you're not gonna get that same answer if you ask like you know does it produce milk or something like that I also just as an aside that also makes me a little I get uncomfortable when people talk about like a weird scale for countries like how weird are they for the same reason right like like the Western educated industrialized rich democratic um, there are these sort of measures of sort of

that assign each country a single number. And I guess that's better than the alternative where that hasn't existed. But it's like with all of these things, with all these models, like Paul Smaldina says models are wrong and stupid, but we need more of them. You know, it's just that obviously assigning a single number to a country is is dumb, but not assigning any kind of numbers at all is dumb. But of course, we just want more numbers along different dimensions. And if doing one number to one country is a step towards multiple dimensions of numbers, that's the right direction. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean there's, you know, uh that literature itself, I think, is quite interesting in

the um the the specific things that are quite notable about humans themselves, like the uh I think the basis for the weird scale is actually cultural FST. I think that's Michael Muthakrishna and colleagues. Um and that calculation um specifically comes from a thing called genetic FST, uh, which is actually used to do as you just described. I mean, how similar are two different species from each other or within a population, how similar are uh two subgroups. Uh and the the basic idea with that calculation is using a variance ratio. So if you have uh a particular species that's divided up into uh populations or groups, you're asking how much of the total variation that exists genetically, um, looking at a

number of different sites, how much of that variation is explained by the between group variation. So there's between group variation and there's within group variation. And if your cultural or genetic FST is very high, the implication is that within each group or within each population, they're relatively very low variance compared to the between group differences. Whereas if the uh variance ratio is quite low, uh, then there's almost no variance explained between groups. Like all the variation really exists within each group. Um, and so this is used as kind of a measure of how differentiated um uh populations are. And you can use this in a genetic context actually as the basis for identifying subspecies,

um, if FST is very high, um, genetic FST, I should say. And uh one of the really remarkable things about humans is that we have extraordinarily low genetic FST measures. Um, like compared to other mammals, it's it's one of the lowest. Um and I mean this is completely. We talked about that in an earlier episode. Oh no, kidding. Yeah, just because of my my race work, right? Where it's just like I think this is might be outdated, but like the the thing of like chimps have like five times more genetic diversity, and even though you don't have subspecies, and we certainly're very all very similar to each other, consistent with like a pretty recent bottleneck pop in a population. I mean, the building you're in there doing incredible work figuring that out, right?

The uh evolutionary history. Yeah. So building on that, I mean, we have uh genetic quantifiable numbers, which suggests that um uh that we don't have the same kind of strong structural differentiation globally as a species that we see with other species. But behaviorally, we're extremely variable. And if you use the same calculation on culture, I mean this is the basis for the weird scale actually. If you take like world value survey data, you do measure really high FSTs, cultural FST specifically, um, that you know, the the the amount of variance. I mean, you can think about this in a regression context. You guys are psychologists, right? So um if you add it in, you know, group as a as a conditioning variable and trying

to explain some measure that you're looking at, you usually get a really big effect from adding in group as like a predictive category. Um, Because the averages across groups tend to be quite different. Even if there's a lot of variable with variability within the groups, the averages themselves structure across groups in a usually in a very noticeable way. And actually, there is a way, you know, in the context of that specific scenario, there is a way to sort of interpret R squared as FST. Like they're they're conceptually very similar concepts. So if you have a high R squared from using group as a predicting variable, right, that's that's kind of like what uh what we mean by saying there's a high FST.

If that if that makes sense. And in this case, the variable would be, you know, just just group identity or something like that. But this is just for one measure. I mean, there's different ways to calculate uh FST depending on uh how many variables you're using. Um and uh yeah, one of the really remarkable things that's come out of this literature is just measuring these absolutely massive cultural FST numbers, um, which which is which is quite a contrast with our genetic uh uh uh our genetic story. And um I mean one one way I've heard this described is that like uh uh genes are smooth and culture is crunchy. Um I like that you know uh it's it's it's quite you know quite remarkable how behaviorally variable uh people tend to be but then the the sort of genetic evidence

suggests exactly what we see with like cross-cultural adoptions which is that um any individual who's adopted into another culture when they're young enough develop and internalize the norms and language of the place they're raised with no difficulty. Like this is not, you know, this is clearly not due to anything besides cultural differentiation in terms of socialization. And that also speaks to the recent genetic bottleneck and our absolute lack of subspecies from sort of the biological or genetic definition. And that's also really neat that we have really stark cultural differences globally, you know, where groups themselves or large cultural groups tend to be very distinct from each other in measurable ways.

But then you also have the ability for individuals to acculturate into those groups if they're young enough with you know essentially no difficulty. And so those two things together, I think, make a very uh uh interesting research program in cultural evolution to sort of understand why that happens or what are the implications of that kind of uh uh that kind of process. Yeah. And I think historically, um, and Brett, you were a student of Pete Richardson, is that right? Uh well I actually don't know your is that or you worked at the so I started actually at Santa Barbara. Oh, you did? Oh, I knew this actually. Now that you say this out loud, we have this conversation. Yeah, please go through. I was I was an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara uh in the early 2000s, and

I took a class from Don Simons actually. It was uh at the time it was Anth5, the intro to physical anthropology. I mean I'm from originally from uh San Diego. So I mean this this, you know, I here I am in Germany, but you know, I think that actually we we we probably have a lot of shared experiences here. Yeah. Um surf Leipzig. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um but you can surf in Munich actually. There's like a little uh river and you can you can watch it go look up YouTube, surf Munich, yeah. Uh-huh. There's a there's a rafting uh uh thing that's down by one of the lakes here. Uh they've got like a fake course you can go down in in river rafting. Fantastic. But uh yeah, so I started at um UC Santa Barbara and uh I took classes

from Simons uh and also John Tubi. So uh I I got to interact with I remember Dad Lieberman was a grad student at the time, uh, I think I might have participated in her dissertation survey. Okay. One of the grossest questions, uh, like there's like disgust things about like, yeah, I I we were clearing out the Center for Evolutionary Psychology physically um from the Anthropo building, and like we came across some of Deb's old surveys, and there's like stuff on that where I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe like it's great science, but yeah, it's very it's designed to be disgusting stuff about like yeah, sexual things and yeah, and relatives and all, yeah, it's it's it's interesting. But anyway, yeah, less we digress.

Yes. You uh yeah. So I I remember today I was I was very influenced and I read The Adapted Mind as an undergraduate. Um and I took uh both the undergrad courses that uh uh that John was offering at the time, which was Anth7 and Anth 107. Uh and I think I might have sat in on the lab group too when I was there. Um, so I got a lot of exposure to the to ideas in evolutionary psychology. Um the thing that I was primarily interested in, I was actually a history major at the time and doing a double double major with anthro. Uh, I mean, the thing that I'd always found myself most uh interested in still today is cultural change and understanding why culture uh you see large-scale cultural changes over

time. And so finding a way to connect evolutionary theory, which I thought was a very compelling research program, with that topic, you know, is some kind of cultural evolution subfield. And it turned out that, you know, there is in fact there is, in fact, a group of researchers who do that. And the thing that really appealed to me the most when I started getting into this literature and why I applied to work with Pete in graduate school was that it was very heavily focused on models. Like the the goal isn't necessarily to um try to um you know make forays into social engineering or to uh uh do a lot of applied work with you know saying oh we can use you know evolution to evolve society or something kind of horrendous like that.

It was very humble. And it was like, look, we just want to understand these processes. Can we develop simple models to sort of capture some phenomena that we think might be going on? And I'm glad you mentioned Paul's quote, you know, from his from his famous paper, you know, models are stupid and we need more of them. Because that's that's exactly it. I mean, we know, you know, from the beginning that these are just little toy models, you know, like no population resembles Hardy Weinberg. Um, but it gives us like a little toolbox or playground for thinking about some topic. And uh, you know, when we're looking at an empirical circumstance, that's the focus that I was talking about, right? Saying, okay, well, what kind of models do I know might be relevant in this circumstance

and what do they say is important to look at? And uh so that's yeah, that's how I ended up uh working with with Pete and Davis. And Pete and Rob uh Boyd were collaborators already at that time when you were working with Pete? Oh yeah. I mean they they they've been collaborators since the late 70s, I think, is when they first started co-authoring papers together. Um, so I'm not not that old. No, I know exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We're we we need to have Pete and Rob on uh we're I'm working on that. Um but uh can you talk a little bit about I mean my take on on that and we all we talked about the Christina episode is that sort of the the older I don't know, I don't know how to say this succinctly, but basically, one of the first

generation things was figuring out sort of is cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology, and how do these two things sort of fit together? And I think there were sort of battles where there were concerns that the cultural evolutionists were sort of very simplifying the psychology and the evolutionary psychologists were like really oversimplifying the world. And I think as like the division of labor has sort of grown up, um I think the sophistication of what we're putting in the psychology and the evolutionary models is increasing. and maybe to some degree the sophistication of the evolutionary psychology models are sort of getting better too. Um, to the point where I'm not sure I think they're kind of fully blended.

But um, do you you know, what was your coming from UCSB and then going to Davis? Did you get a sense of that sort of uh this within group conflict that maybe has sort of waned since uh did you know. Well, like like like David and I were just discussing, I I did have to learn these things uh over the course of time as a student. Um I mean it's like any I think anybody's experience when they get into science, you know, you sort of have the view from the outside and then as you participate in it, you're like, oh, like it's way more messy uh than you might have thought of in the past. Um I mean uh the the basic questions in cultural evolution often have to deal with you know what kind of what kind of cognitive adaptations would be uh suited to a particular information

environment. Um is that not evolutionary psychology? Like you're you're thinking about how psychology might evolve. I mean, like, just in the basic sense of, you know, this is a topic. Um, I mean, clearly there's a lot of overlap here in in terms of personnel and interests. Um, and actually, this is another thing which uh might be, you know, you connect it back to our just discussion earlier. I mean, I think that the cultural distance is quite small uh between these subfields, but you know, you wouldn't necessarily know it if you see people arguing with each other. Uh, because it's, you know, it's it's all relative, right? I mean, this is relative distance in a particular context, you know, matters quite a bit.

Uh, and I think that, you know, we're just as capable of circling the wagons, you know, when we see uh science itself being, you know, or just the the ability of doing empiricism and trying to understand the world uh being criticized. Um so uh yeah, I mean I I I can definitely say having moved between these these circles that uh uh that there's different emphases for sure. Um and uh yeah, I think you're right. Like as as time has progressed, there's been a lot of blending taking place. Um uh I mean there's still some interesting differences which uh which come up. I mean, there's not just different emphases, but I think that you know, places people work, you know, I think it's actually not a coincidence that, you know, weird as a concept uh

comes from Joe Henrick, uh, which I would say is more on the cultural evolution side of the spectrum of uh uh of evolutionary approaches to humans. And that's more of a critique towards academic psychology as a field. Um so uh yeah I mean the extent I actually I'd be curious to know about your take, Dave, on the sort of the long-term effect of weird. Uh do you think that's that's changed psychology itself or evolutionary psychology in particular? Um I mean I think that uh it's I think one, it's had a very good effect in the sense of um it's been a moral um embarrassment to psychologists who have sort of not considered cultural variation or cross-cultural work pragmatically. Um I don't I think the deeper thing, which has sort of always been baked

in, I think, to the evolutionary sciences, like, and even as much as Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson um disagreed uh with Lita Cosmoduse and John Tubi. You know, and I and I will say, like, you know, as a student of Lita and John's, Pete and Rob have only ever been gracious and kind and wonderful to us. And I think we've we've all had conversations where I think with them, I've had conversations with them where we've talked about sort of the distances decreasing considerably. But all of the evolutionary behavioral sciences baked into it has been cross-cultural work, right? Where, like, you know, if we think this is a human universal, this is human nature, right? This is part of the design of the evolved phenotype.

It makes predictions about we might see cultural variation in this attribute, but not this other one. So, like, you know, if there's a cheater detection system, then certain parts should be culturally universal, certain parts should might vary, right? depending on different things, right? And it gives you that evolutionary approach, it gives you an invariance to look for, but then that invariance also includes a contingent design. So I think baked into the theory of adaptationism in design-mindedness gives you theory to predict cultural variability and uniformity. And because of that, that's been baked into the theory. I think in psychology, broadly, and I'm making a very broad generalization, and this is not

true for every aspect, but the idea of weird has sort of been treated as like, oh no, we do need to like worry about cross-cultural things. But the deep insight of we need design-mindedness or theoretical predictions of variability or invariability, I think that still has not really happened. Um, so in other words, there's sort of a no notion that we should run things very in different places. But if you don't have a theory of that, it just sort of becomes this thing of, well, I have this idea that people tend to do this, and I probably should also run it somewhere that feels different culturally. And I think that happens a lot. So I think it's it's good in that sense, but I think the deeper transition to

design mindedness is still happening. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would agree. There that um the you know the weirdest people in the world that paper, you know, made a big splash um saying that, you know, we're we're we have all of this research on Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic nations. That's a problem. But I think one of the things that has led to is a kind of performative diversity where, oh, let's just throw in some some other samples in some other places um when we don't really need to. We don't have a principled theoretical reason to consider these places. We don't have a principled prediction to make about how we expect culture to either vary or not vary between these places. We're just going to include these places just as a kind of performative thing to show that

we're we're being good scientists. I think that is not very helpful. Although, you know, it's always nice to broaden the data set, but still, you want to have a principled reason to consider the places you're considering, and you want to have actual uh predictions to make. And without that, um the this uh uh a critique of, you know, we don't our samples are too weird or too non weird or whatever, it's it's sort of missing the point. I think the the deeper point is that we need we need better theories and we need um to understand uh uh where cultural variation comes from, where cultural uniformity comes from, and and we need to to dig deeper uh into the underlying mechanisms. Yeah. Well said. I think there's this really interesting debate too about um, I mean, maybe we could talk

about the jukebox model if you guys remember that. Oh, there's lots lots of back and forth on the jukebox model. Enlightener was news on what what the jukebox model is. Jukebox model. Well, so the so the the scenario, I remember reading this in uh in the adapted mind, uh Barco, Cosmones, and Tubi. Uh, and they were trying to imagine a particular mechanism that might produce geographic variation in behavior without necessarily involving what we might call cultural transmission. And so they had this, they were using the metaphor of a jukebox, which uh look it up, kids. Look it up, look it up. Exactly. It's sort of like a large phone that played music, you know. Um you could select from refrigerator.

Exactly. Refrigerator size, you know, and so uh they they made the argument, well, imagine that these things are programmed so that they play a specific song or type of music, um, you know, given a particular set of coordinates that they're located at. So if they're in a high latitude environment, uh they tend to play, I don't know, jazz. Uh if they are near the equator, uh they play, you know, punk rock. Can I just say I love this metaphor because it's like jukebox technology combined with like GPS, right? It's sort of K-pop, but yeah, exactly. And we need more of them, right? So yeah. Sorry, I just love the but I mean the physicality. Like they're really going on in on this. They're saying it's not even like the local ecology.

It's not even like it's literally just the physical coordinates on the globe. Yeah. Um and uh this was like a verbal argument, right? So they said, okay, so imagine this scenario, and then imagine that you were, you know, looking at the diversity of music that was being produced by all these machines in different parts of the world. And you'd say, Oh, look, you know, there's this cluster in the tropics where they're all, you know, playing punk rock. You know, this must be a punk rock place. You know, like this is the cultural transmission mechanism is sustaining this tradition. Um and I mean that's, you know, as a cultural as you could get, basically, right? So I mean, I I I would describe this, I think, as like a reaction norm type model, right?

That you you've got some instead of a cultural norm, you've got a reaction norm. Um that uh there's some kind of trigger that's causing a particular set of conditional switches in in a cognition to produce a specific behavior. But there's nothing you would describe as kind of like cultural transmission or cultural influence. Uh right. I mean, even culture itself in that circumstance, like as a concept, potentially could be uh maybe not that usable. I mean, the term they can use is ev evoked culture, I believe. Evoked culture, exactly. So like you push the button and the culture is evoked, and you don't push the button in this place and the culture is not evoked. Right. Right. So I mean, I would kind of put this in the same category as the Harvey Weinberg thing, like

where uh the I mean it's it's neat as a as an example to think, okay, this is a way that variation could be produced. Um I mean, empirically though, we we see a lot of transmission. Like we can measure it, right? And you know, so as as as a null model, I think it's very compelling to say like you don't necessarily need, you know, you can't just assume, oh, there's cultural variation, therefore it's being transmitted. But uh then the work becomes, you know, okay, well, how how do you detect evidence for transmitted culture? Or, you know, what what what are the kinds of things that might you know lend themselves to sort of a jukebox-evoked uh type scenario? And then what other things, you know, like language, I think is a good example, where uh I

mean, obviously there's transmission taking place. Um That kind of distinction is very useful for for uh as a starting place for thinking about uh cultural traditions um or what what could potentially be cultural traditions. So um okay so we we just went into the jukebox metaphor. I believe they brought it up to make this distinction between uh uh evoked culture and transmitted culture. And the argument is there is just because we see cultural variation, it doesn't mean that we should assume automatically that it's transmitted. It could be a contingent response to an ecological difference, right? So if if there's an ecological difference there and we have adaptations that are sensitive to that ecological difference, say we share when there's a lot of variance in uh resource

shortages and windfalls, and we don't share when there's not a lot of variance in resource shortages and windfalls. That could vary by ecology, and you could have an adaptation that is sensitive to that variable. And if one culture shares and another culture doesn't share so much, uh, you don't necessarily need to assume that that is because um of you know transmitted culture or or norms shaping one place and not the other. It could just be a um an emergent output of the underlying sharing psychology. And so that's the argument that Tubian Cosmodies make. Incidentally, a lot of people misinterpret Tubian Cosmodies as saying they think all culture is evoked, or that, you know, and they and this is often caricatured.

So that's absolutely not what they think. They brought this up as as to make a point that we just don't know. We cannot assume that that culture is transmitted or evoked uh without actually doing the hard work of of figuring out what's going on. And so that example uh was made for for that purpose. So what what what what do you think is is the the broader lesson or takeaway from from uh thinking in these terms uh I mean generative processes are the name of the game here right I mean you're you're trying to think of a specific like a literally a generative model. Like, and uh of course it's ridiculous, you know, humans are not jukeboxes. Um, but it's a starting place for thinking about uh a specific, you know, mechanism that

leads to an outcome, right? And sort of inventorying the different kinds of mechanisms or imagining new ones, uh, or sort of, you know, thinking, okay, well, if this specific mechanism is happening, you know, how would we potentially interpret it or misinterpret it? Um so one of the things I've been spending a lot of time on recently is thinking about um coordination equilibria. So, like, let's I'd be curious to know what you both think about this. So, like, if you take the example of like driving on the left side of the road or the right side of the road, um, you know, it's not like the jukebox model because uh people aren't just responding ASO. I mean, in the jukebox model, it literally doesn't matter what other jukeboxes are doing

around you. Like, there's no influence from one jukebox to another in the original model, right? But in something like, you know, uh coordination equilibrium, uh, when I pull onto the road, what everybody else has already decided to do has a big impact on the payoffs that I experience, right? Like if I choose to drive on the left side of the road in California, I'm gonna have a bad time. Um And so there's a component of social influence there, right? In the sense that people have made choices, and then those choices are going to impact me, and they're going to impact my choice. And so, okay, I would, you know, as a rational agent, maybe I would say, okay, well, I'm going to drive on the same side of the road as everybody else.

So is that culture? That I think is a is a really interesting question. Like it's not quite the same thing as you know learning from somebody. Like, you know, you're being taught, oh, you should drive on the left side of the road, you should drive on the right side of the road. Um, although of course that does happen. But in many of these equilibrious circumstances, it's something that's reinforced by you know, just basically a rational calculation. Like given the circumstance, you know, the best thing for me to do is this. And I mean, it doesn't really matter that that's being produced by everybody else's choices. That's just the circumstance in front of me, right? Um, so in a sense, it is also uh kind of a cultural, right?

Because uh uh because there really isn't any, you know, there isn't any way that like information about the choice is directly moving from person to person. Um or maybe it is though. I mean, it's debatable. Like if you think of that, you know, it's definitely there's more social influence than the jukebox model, right? Right. I mean, maybe a better analogy would be something like prices. So if you think in you know Hayekian terms, you know, prices are an emergent product of everyone acting self-interestedly in a marketplace. So I, if if I make the price too low, then I'm gonna run out of my stuff. If I set the price too high, no one's gonna buy my stuff. If you have a bunch of different actors in a marketplace trying to make those local

decisions about how to set the right price for the particular goods or services they're selling, you get something like a map of the value of different things or of the supply and demand of different goods and services in the local economy. And nobody actually sat down and planned out what the prices were going to be. There's no central authority that said the price of bread is going to be this, the price of chairs is going to be this. It's just an emergent product of everyone acting uh self-interestedly in a marketplace, right? Um and so you could then pose the question: are prices cultural? Nobody sat down in a centralized place and decided what the prices were going to be. And yet there's this strong correlation between prices and and supply and demand levels.

And so how can we explain prices? And it's you could think of um driving on one side of the road or the other side of the road in similar terms. Um, you know, in some cases we all sat down and decided we're gonna drive on the left side or the right side, but in some cases just kind of happened spontaneously. Like everyone's trying to, you know, drive and not crash, and as a result of everyone pursuing their self interest and trying to not crash, this emergent outcome uh naturally emerged. Um do you view that kind of thing as quote unquote culture? Do you view it as something else? How should we understand those kinds of emergent uh products? Yeah, well, I mean it's definitely social influence.

I think that's one of the neat things is that um what you're basically describing is agents who are essentially incapable of uh what we would describe as like social interaction. Like they just literally see a price in front of. I think the the classic economic description is imagining like an auctioneer, right, is sort of telling you know what the going price is for something. And that's that's a simplification for what the market is. It is a single auctioneer who's you know listing off prices, and the agent is responding to that. They're just they're just getting a number, right? It's not like they are in a social context and they're looking around at other people. Um so the agent itself isn't internalizing anything, it's not taking in what we

might call like cultural information or cultural norms and passing those along, but they are being influenced by others. And then their choice is adding to the influence of the, you know, the next individual in the decision-making process, right? So there is clearly some kind of a transmission of influence. But I mean, if we really go to the opposite extreme here and think about like something that clearly is cultural, that has sort of a similar shape to it, you know, it might be something like um, I don't know, standing at a red light, you know, at midnight when nobody's gonna get a little bit of a little bit of very German, very German. Very German, exactly. And as I go home here, right? So, I mean, people will be standing there.

There's no the street is completely deserted, right? Um, but that light is red, and you're not supposed to cross on red. And so people are standing there and they wait for the green light to go. But this is highly variable across societies, right? This, I mean, you mentioned, oh, it's you know it's stereotypically German to do this. It is not stereotypical for other populations. I mean, they'll be like, what are you stupid? Like, why would you wait if nobody's around? You could just go, right? Um, and I mean the the answer is clearly there was a socialization process. Like people learned that you know, the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance is to do this through some process. Like they're they're their their brains have information in them, which they've learned

over the course of a socialization process that structures their behavior in ways that you can predict uh maybe beyond rational calculation. Like if if you had a rational agent, they're looking at the street, they're like, I can go. You know, like I I might quibble with, I mean, I uh intuitively, like my the reason why I would not run a red light at midnight when no one is around is just on the off chance that like there happens to be a cop driving by at that exact moment and I didn't see them coming, like that could ruin my life. I I you know get you know a ticket, you know, whatever. Um that would be a terrible thing to happen. And I just it's such a it's a small probability that'll happen, but I just don't want to

take the chance. I'll just I might as well wait. It's not a big deal. It's not a big cost on me to wait a few minutes, you know, a few seconds or a few minutes for for the light to change. And so I would expect um variation in whether s people blow red lights to not so much be a product of whether they've quote unquote internalized this quote unquote norm, but just like how many police are there in the environment? Like how effective is policing? How scared are people of the local police? Like that would be, I think, the the the key variable to look at rather than whether someone has quote unquote internalized a quote unquote norm. Uh do you would you would you buy that Uh well, I guess the way to to look for it would be

to find circumstances where there isn't really a strong policing presence. Uh but people are still really adherent to a particular behavior pattern. Right. I think that would be kind of the the thing. I mean, we're just basically saying, Okay, well the theory might suggest to look for this now, right? Like the specific scenarios. So if there if there are literally no costs. So if if if if police never uh pull you over or stop you from breaking this rule. And there are no social costs either. Like no one frowns on upon you, no one looks down on you or thinks you're a bad person or or a reckless driver or whatever. If there are no costs at all, then I would expect uh people to do to to not follow the

norm. Can I just say as a I so like we lived in a very and we were just visiting, we just went back for a little bit. Brett, I should have we have next time we visit we'll come down and say hi to Leipzig. So we live in a sleepy par Dahlem in Berlin. And there's like even the pedestrian like stop, you know, like red and green um goes. The um and it would not be uncommon for everybody like getting off the U-ba on the subway stop when it's red to just stop and wait, even if it's dark, you know, and like there's no cops around, nobody like, you know, there's foxes like running around, you know, like it's very quiet. Um, but I still do think it's rational in like the following two senses. Number one, um, there is sometimes opacity.

So sometimes there will be a green light and a red light, and you think it's clear. And I had the distinct experience in Germany of like as an American when I first got there, of uh being like, Well, it's it's red, but clearly there's nothing gonna happen and I am gonna be fine. And then like a car would come. And then the second thing was the lights really work in the sense of they're really well engineered to be timed well. So you're not waiting an exorbitant amount of time. So like in the US, you might be waiting for seven minutes to cross a road. That never happens in Germany. So I experienced not worrying about the cops, but just sort of like this is a sensible like coordination device. And it's actually just sort of like easier to like offload my processing to this thing

that really works well. And then I've actually it's so it's I think it's David, it's your point that like it's still a rational calculation of costs and benefits. It's just a different set in my experience, like why I would wait. And then like it does get tweaked. I mean, I can nerd out about like why people cross, but like I'd seen Germans like at a particular light, like cross the red light. And I'm like, oh, okay, that one, like it's that coordination device doesn't quite work as well as the other ones. And so I would start like running that one. And then um, and then there's like a really breaking the social contract. Yeah, exactly. And then if there's exactly and then if there's kids around, you really don't go because

that's like and that's like a high social cost and there's like recursive common knowledge that like you don't do that when kids are around and like people will look at you if you do that. So that's at least my experience. Brett, you're still there. So like you know you can you can flesh that out or if your experience is different. But that was my experience of like a decade in Germany. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something to be said for rational laziness. Uh in the sense rational enough I mean so David, like to to your scenario here of running the you know I haven't driven a car in like, you know, eight years. So I'm totally disconnected from the car culture I grew up in. Um, but in the context of running a red light, which you should not do, right?

I think you should advise your listeners to, you know. I'm so sorry, but I lived in Connecticut after moving from California. And Connecticut is wonderful in many ways, but it was so ridiculous because people would wait, people would run red lights so much that people would run red lights for maybe a second or two, but everybody knew that people were running red lights. So people would wait at green lights for like five to seven seconds. So everybody was way worse off. Coordination failure. Total coordination failure where like people were gaining a second or two, but everybody was losing five or seven seconds on the other end. Clear example of coordination failure. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's the I think there's actually a totally undeveloped topic of traffic

cultures. Since we've gotten on this, I mean, everybody seems to have opinions about like East Coast drivers and West Coast drivers. I don't know where you guys are from, but you know, if you're in California. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I I notice intuitive differences between um uh Midwest drivers and and now I live in the West, I live in LA, and and and LA drivers. LA drivers are way bigger assholes than the Midwest Midwestern driver. In LA, nobody lets you in if you're trying to change lane. They just they they don't don't give a shit. And in the Midwest, people slow down and let you in. Uh uh I I would imagine that has something to do with the level of traffic uh in LA, where letting someone in is sort of letting them cut in line, and if everyone's waiting in line

all the time in cars, then you don't want to let someone in. But if in the Midwest, if there's less traffic, it's not a big deal. So I would I don't know. I do LA. I'm under the impression. Yeah. I I'm under the impression that it's totally different, like in New York. The driving dynamics there. Connecticut is terrible. I mean, David, you lived in New York, but you didn't drive then, right? I didn't drive though, no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I Connecticut was way worse than LA. Like I was I was almost like in tears compared to LA driving. Like LA drivers are Midwestern compared to Connecticut. I hope we get a lot of angry Connecticut people. Well that's the point, right? Like, but yeah, like that that like kind of uh megalopolis corridor um where it was

sort of combining traffic with like the infrastructure doesn't work and people were just sort of free riding um all the coordination devices was sort of what it felt like. Yeah. So it seems I want to I want to make a perhaps more controversial point. Because it seems like we're we're we're hard pressed to find a canonical example of quote unquote culture, where like I sit you down on my lap, I in I you know bequeath to you the norms and values of my culture, and you internalize them. And then you you follow those norms just because they're norms, and you know that you're supposed to follow those norms. Like that canonical stereotyped example of culture, we're having a hard time finding any clear examples of it.

In fact, a lot of the times when we try to impart our culture to people, they just kind of ignore us, they roll their eyes, they do what they want to do anyway, and like it just doesn't work. Like we try I believe me, I've tried to impart culture onto my daughter uh as hard as I can, and it doesn't work. She doesn't listen. She does what she wants to do anyway. And so what I the controversial point I want to make to you is it seems like most culture is actually not this, you know, uh vertical transmission of I give you the norms and values and you accept them and you internalize them, but it's more just it's more Hayekian. It's more like this emergent product of everyone just following their self-interest, doing

what is rational for them to do in their particular circumstances. And as a result, we get these emergent outcomes. We get the the outcome of people driving on the left side or the right side of the road. We get the outcome of people using this kind of slang or this kind of slang. We get the outcome of uh people having these different uh sharing norms or moral or moral rules or um aesthetic tastes and preferences. Everyone's just pursuing their local goals, trying to gain status, trying to outcompete other people in their environment. And and when everyone's doing that, you get this emergent outcome that results from it. And so it's less this I am vertically transmitting culture to you and bequeathing to you

the culture that was passed on to my ancestors. It's more just I'm just doing what I want. I'm just pursuing my goals, just trying to make a living, trying to impress people, trying to gain status. And when everyone is doing that, you get culture. And so that's that would be the the point I would I would make to you. What what do you think about that that most culture is just is like that? Uh I mean I don't know what most means in this context. You know, like if we do like a list, you know, like listens to K pop, uh plays Monopoly, you know, like there. That was just where does the where does the list go, right? I mean, uh, I think that what we're probably on the same page about is the idea that behavioral feedbacks set conditions for decision making

in ways that create behavioral variation, like persistent behavioral variation between populations can be produced by those kinds of coordination equilibria in different places. Um I think that the fact that it's transmitted in some way is interesting. Like it's there's clearly a social influence here, right? That you know, individuals might attend to. And then the question becomes I mean, this is where the cultural evolution modeling literature kind of starts is saying, okay, imagine that you've got a selective environment now where your cognition is evolving in this kind of a you know coordination type problem, and it's costly. Like it's costly to pay attention all the time and try to figure out if I would benefit

this one time from running the red light or there's a cop around. Like it's costly to um Try to calculate how much social sanctioning I might get in this particular because you have to pay attention, right? I mean, like it requires attention is a resource, right? Um and I think that one of the things you get from studying this in like an informational sense is that norm psychology is actually a nice solution to this. Like the idea that I can internalize a rule and it actually helps everybody coordinate, and I don't have to pay any costs to paying attention now. Right? This is this is basically, you know, potentially a model for explaining why you might get the emergence of a norm psychology, which is quite stark, starkly different, I think, from

the mechanism you're talking about. Um I mean empirically, this is the this is the other thing, is that um it really does seem like there's uh uh the the the there's a norm psychology is a big part of our story when we're understanding why people behave the way they do. I mean, uh I was thinking about this paper by um Bailey House and colleagues uh looking at the way people behave cross culturally in the economic game experiments, right? Like the dictator game and the ultimatum game. Um, like you have persistent variation between populations, but you also can track in in their study, which came out a couple of years ago, um, you can track the trajectory of children like moving towards the adult values that that are that are

consistently displayed across populations. Um Which I mean, it seems like that's more consistent with the idea that they're learning what's appropriate or what's inappropriate in a particular circumstance. Um but I mean, I think more functionally you could just appeal to the idea that if it's cheaper to learn a particular condition that helps you maintain a coordination equilibrium, and then you don't have to calculate, uh, that you might expect uh a psychology to develop an adaptation to just learn the learn what the equilibrium is and then internalize that. And I think, I mean, to just sort of add to both things. Um also wonder if it isn't that it's a little bit of both in the sense of you know, one of the arguments, and Brett, you talked about this earlier, is that we're

this sort of weird species that really the cultural phenotype is really different And it's independent of our smooth genes, our crunchy cultural differences. We that has itself been sort of an enduring part of our evolved psychology, you know, that we have this idea that there will be transmitted information. And then we have this evolved psychology, this norm psychology. And I think the way I think about it is that the norm psychology is itself a complex adaptation that's sort of calculating, is what I'm doing based on this sequential social transmission process? And then is it rationally for me to follow it or not? And is what I'm going to do affect how other people act? So I think it's all coordination and rational choice all the way down in this respect,

which is that I don't think, to David's point, I don't think there's any social learning that isn't some result of sort of like a cost-benefit individual analysis, whether the evolved psychology figuring that cost-benefit utility over evolutionary time, like you know, when you're a baby, you're not going to trial and error figure out what's costly or not. You're just sort of doing this quote-unquote innate, you know, contingency. But then, even um, but still, even for something like this red light thing, you know, there's still some grammar of cost-benefit analysis, even though there's represented as a norm. So I think like the norms, I do think you know there is an evolved norm psychology, but

it's suffused with a cost-benefit analysis too, because that would be selected for, right? Like to have a really naive norm psychology that is completely blind to cost-benefits, and is it beneficial for me or not? And I think we all have this experience, and I think this is part of why we have this theoretical uh disagreement is like the the 1984 thing of like there's a norm, it's really strong, and it's fucking stupid. It's like it's it's horrible, it's bad, we shouldn't obey it. And I think that's a result of this psychology that's simultaneously like representing what has been the transmitted information, and then also like what's the landscape, how it benefits me and others? And I think the expression of that um is is sort of like the moral outrage in like

1984 and so much other sort of like fiction of like we shouldn't follow this, or like kids at school who are like this is dumb. So I I kind of agree with both of you. I don't know if that's uh helpful, but yeah. Yeah. There's a study I was thinking of just now. Um that was done in a daycare, uh, looking at the timing of people coming late to pick up their kids. Do you know this study? Uh it's amazing. I think it was done in Haifa in Israel uh some time ago. And it was an economics study. It was published in economics. And they were studying the effect of changing the policy in the daycare from please don't come late because we're waiting. You know, your your kids are here and we can't leave. So it's very inconvenient.

To uh, you're gonna pay a price if you come too late. You're gonna get fined. I mean, this was my experience. I've got you know older kids now, but when they were young, uh, there was definitely like a fine that was experienced if you came too late to pick up your kids. Is this in the US or Germany? Uh this was in the US when I was when I was in Germany there was never a fine. It was just like, please don't come late. We we have to we have to go home. Yeah. Um but uh yeah in the US it was totally commercialized, right? It was like you will get sixty dollars for every half hour, right? Or something astronomically high. And so in the uh Israeli daycare, they made this switch. They moved from like, you know, basically just like a pleading with people not to come late

to here's here's what we're gonna pay, you know, you're gonna you're gonna have to pay this much if you come late. Uh and paradoxically, perhaps, it increased the rate of tardiness because now there was a price associated with the lateness. And so people are like, is 30 minutes worth this much to me? And the answer is sometimes yes, right. And so the title, the title of the paper is A Fine is a Price. It's this extremely famous paper in economics. Uh and it's it's such a wonderful illustration of um, at least from my point of view, uh the differences between looking at it in terms of rational cost benefit analysis and sort of looking at it as this vague, you know, pro social behavior that we're just asking

you to do, like to not please don't come late because you're inconveniencing somebody else. Um and I don't know, it almost seems to me like there's two modes of thinking about these. Like as soon as you start adding money involved, it really does just seem like a commercial exchange where it's like, okay, I'm I'm paying you sixty dollars to stay here for thirty more minutes, right? Yeah, you wouldn't have offered me sixty bucks or you wouldn't have exactly your price for this is where we're gonna do it. This is the market this is clearly the market rate here, right? So uh but thinking about it that way, you know, I mean if you think about any fine that way, then it really becomes kind of ghoulish, right?

Where it's just like, Oh well if you have enough money, you know, then it's just like you're paying to break the law, right? It's just like, okay, I will pay this much to to to not have to do this, right? Um, but uh, you know, is that is that the way we think about norms? I mean, it feels to me like in normal circumstances, uh, it's not like that. That people do actually behave prosocially without the explicit threat of fining, because they don't think about it as like an economic exchange with an explicit cost-benefit. And as soon as you do do that, it it shifts modes. And then it does actually become much more like a market uh interaction. Um and in that that circumstance, I think it's very clear that you know that that uh

rational calculation is the right way to think about this because you you have a price schedule, right? You know exactly what it's gonna be. Like you can map out, you know, one hour of their time is this much money. Um so anyway, I just think you know, there's different ways of thinking about um institutional structures. Uh sometimes it emphasizes very explicit costs on the part of the agent where they have to make these calculations, you know, like is this um you know, is this the right thing for me to do right now to give me some payoff that I want with some acceptable risk, right? And I'm trying to put all these variables together in this complex calculus. Um other times I think it's like, you know, I just do this because that's what we do here.

And it's you know, vaguely creating a coordination equilibrium and it's solving some kind of you know social, you know, collective action problem. Uh, but I don't know if people think about it more than that. Like that's that's just my vague guess here is that if you actually see how people are thinking about this, they just say, Well, I do that because that's what people told me to do. Um, which I think is quite, it's it's quite it's quite the you know the the point of controversy, right? It comes down to this. I I would expect that even when people say, you know, I'm just doing it because that's the way we do it around here, is that they're implicitly simulating someone who might judge them for not doing that.

And that they're interpreting that as a social cost. Like I'm going to pay reputational costs for not doing this. Uh, people are going to make the following inferences about me. If I violate this norm, they're gonna think I'm a bad person, I'm lazy, I'm you know, uh unreliable, whatever. And I do not want people to think that about me, so that therefore I'm not going to do it. It's not just it's a norm, therefore I follow it. It's oh, what what how what are people gonna think of me? What's gonna happen if I don't do this? And they're simulating those outcomes, they're simulating the audience and and and what people are gonna think of them. And I think we're constantly doing this all the time.

We have a little audience in our head that's constantly judging us uh for every little thing we do and plan on doing and anticipate doing. And we're factoring those anticipated costs into everything we do. Um, and so I think just positing that a social psychology, that uh impression management, for lack of a better term, gets you explains a lot. It explains a lot of what we intuitively think of as norms. And I think it even explains the example you just mentioned with um, you know, paying the late fee, right? I think what we're doing is we're running a social calculation where where we're saying, Oh, uh, if they're charging me money uh for for showing up late. That means that they don't think I'm a bad person.

Then if I pay the fine, then I've made amends and then they're then they're cool with it, right? So I might as well pay the pay the fine and they're and they'll be cool with it. But um in the absence of that fine, you might make the inference that they're gonna judge you as a bad parent, right? And that's gonna uh hurt your reputation. Um and so I think that is probably what's going on and explaining these different outcomes is that we have a a sophisticated social psychology that is anticipating the inferences that are made about us for every little thing we do. And that as a result of that social psychology, as a result of us playing our status games and and and thinking about how other people are gonna judge us and trying to navigate the

social world, we get these emergent things that we call norms. Um Anyway, that that's my spiel. Um, I I think it's an it continues to be an interesting debate uh in evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. Um, how we should think about these things, how we should think about norms, how we should think about culture, what what is the role of evolved psychology? What is the evolved psychology like? Uh Brett, we are we are running up on what two hours now? Almost. Yeah, this one quick. This is wonderful. And I think just a put a lot of fun. Put a pin on that. I I think like Brett, I don't think you would disagree with that thing that David said too. I think like part of it is just that the content then of like what are the implicit things

that people are worrying about is part of like the norm. So like in the same way, like the um you Brett talked about the um auction, right? In a in a more sophisticated version, it's not just that you're willing to go with the price in the auction, but like you're you're going and you're paying like, I don't know, $10 for the bag of flour. I'm like astounded at the price of groceries in the US compared to Germany. It's like crazy. We're paying like 10, three to 10 times more for like every item of food compared to Germany. It's crazy. But anyway, yeah, my sympathies. Yeah. Um, so, but like, you know, me, me actually like paying a price for something, David will see that, right? And that becomes part of then his cost benefit analysis, right?

So like I think the the transmission chain of behaviors were psychologically aware of that. And then also the David's doing a cost benefit analysis. And I'm sort of aware that David might do a cost benefit analysis of what I'm what I'm doing. And that factors into my cost benefit analysis of like, should I do it? And so I think that yeah, I think this just comes back to like from my perspective, I see these views as very compatible. It's just that there's no pure cultural transmission without a cost benefit analysis. It's like just like fractal, where there's always like a uh inside that. And it might in it, but it's different. It's different than like a purely fungible market economy thing. It's like this uncertainty about social costs, which have a very different dynamic, for

example, than like the market. And so I I I view these as like I think you're both right, but maybe that's because I'm from Buffalo and that's the way people are. Well, maybe I mean that that that variation I think is, I mean, would Midwest nice is also a it's a real thing, right? Exactly. Um well I guess this would be the the the the question that I that I would think about in this circumstance. I mean, if if you really wanted to communicate to your kid, for example, that certain behavior will result in social sanctioning, Like presumably that would be really important to impart upon them. I mean, they they might not appreciate it, but it's like, look, kid, you gotta believe me. I know that it doesn't seem like it's a big deal to cross the red light.

Uh, but you will die, right? And I know this isn't obvious. Like you're counterintuitively, it doesn't seem like there's a threat here. Um, so I think that's maybe uh uh one one of the topics that's most interesting to me is what kind of cognitive heuristics or psychology would develop to impart that kind of information if it maps onto these sort of status game equilibria that people are in? Right. Like, because you you might expect that, right? You would expect that, like, if it's adaptive for you to figure out what local behavioral coordination uh equilibria are, uh, then learning it in a very fast way from social communication, someone telling you who wants to give you adaptive information, uh, sort of opens up the door, right, for that kind of a cognitive

learning mechanism. And it does that does seem like you know, sitting on the lap and hearing grandpa tell you, you know, in our country, you know, we stand at the red light instead of crossing because you're gonna get taken away if you don't, right? So I don't know. That maybe we can uh agree on that point is that obviously there's an underlying physical reality here that is what's mapping behavior onto payoffs. Um and the basic task is to figure out what kind of evolutionary dynamics uh might lead to certain cognitive heuristics in that kind of circumstance. Yeah. Well, uh, we, as David mentioned, we uh the audience in our heads about the people who are like, my God, how long is this gonna go?

We do need to wrap up, but I do want to ask, uh, we have to ask the uh the mandatory question of if we should have asked you anything. Um, and then I also wanted to ask for you if and you can do both. Uh you we still have plenty of time because we started a little later. Um uh is can you talk a little bit about the Leipzig Institute. So you're at a Mox Planck. We had Annie Woods on so far, who was a research group leader in one of the independent research groups. You're you're in one of the permanent research groups in Leipzig. Can you talk a little bit either about sort of um what the group more broadly does or just also sort of what the structure is at that Mox Planck? Yeah, so I'm I'm in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture.

And our institute is Mox Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology is the is the main focus. So in our institute itself, we have a number of different departments. There's one on cross-cultural psychology, there's genetics, archaeology, linguistics. So there's a number of different kinds of affiliated teams that are working in the building. And our group specifically is focusing on topics related to behavioral ecology, mostly for humans. You know, the title has human in it, human behavior, ecology, and culture, but we also include non-human uh uh uh organisms like birds, uh and uh and the main focus is it's I mean it's a really compelling program that our director laid out, uh Richard McElreath. That um basically all of these questions that we're talking about have

a need for lots of data. Like we need to have more data, potentially sharper theory based on new kinds of data. And so our mandate is to try to develop both of those simultaneously. So we're building up new theoretical sort of stages for looking at particular kinds of data sets. And we're also looking for new kinds of data sets, or specifically in the context of collecting longitudinal field data. So my my particular side of things has been working with the Chimani Project. I know you had Chris on earlier, so you might have talked about. Yeah, we're gonna have the Chimani. Oh there we go. Yeah. So yeah, I've been collaborating with Mike Gervin for um God, like 13 years now. uh, and working in Bolivia.

Uh, and I think that, you know, the the way forward, that's just my general sense, is that we want to have lots of data to specifically target these kinds of questions. Like what can we say about um the information environment that people are in when they're making decisions in like a naturalistic setting? Um And uh more specifically to my interest too is what are the kind of mechanisms that are causing cultural change to happen? So, like if you, you know, I mean, it's one thing to talk about, oh, why are there patterns of cultural variation spatially? Um, but we also see changes in those patterns too, right? As some get bigger and some shrink, um, new ideas emerge and spread, some die And so that's uh I think kind of the overall theme of the work that we do

is figuring out ways to combine sort of evolutionary theory with uh empirical data collection uh in sort of a high-resolution field context that helps us maybe make forward you know make forward progress on on uh sort of the the standard debates or the standard questions, I think, in evolutionary anthropology or evolutionary science. Yeah, it's a beautiful building. Leipzig is very important historically. Wilhelm Wont was uh, you know, lived knocking around in Leipzig in the 1854. I don't remember anymore. 59, something like that. Yeah. Um, and uh there's a climbing wall in the institute, too. It's a beautiful building. That is true. I've never actually used it though, but some of our some of our department members had.

Uh in terms of questions, uh, I was hoping you'd ask me about Go, but we never got a chance to talk about that. Um, I don't know if that's something that uh either of you are familiar with as a I mean, David, you're a a game master yourself of sorts. Um and uh there's there's there's there's a piece of cultural transmission for you, right? I mean, we have a a board game which has been around for like 3,000 years. Uh people have commentaries on you know games that are hundreds of years old. Uh, and then the way in which those strategies change over time. I mean, people are learning these strategies on the board, they're changing them, there's successes, there's failures. The most recent, of course, uh uh interesting thing has been the arrival of AlphaGo.

Uh, and the sort of the effect of now having um these superhuman players that we can consult with all the time. I mean, that's that's kind of neat because we're talking about like, you know, uh cultural transmission from non-human agents, essentially, right? That you're you're you're getting feedback from L well not LLMs, they're called deep learning algorithms. Um but I mean this is true for a lot of games, I think. In general we've got um this sort of revolutionary uh revolutionary effect of having like saber metrics uh for professional sports, uh doing very careful analyses of particular tactics in baseball and soccer, uh, football. Uh there's, you know, things like stockfish and chess and alpha go and go.

Um, and I mean, it's really having a huge impact on the actual strategic environment in the game. Like actually, you know, quantifying the way that ideas move through these uh these games. Uh it's it's quite noticeable. And that's that's something I think that's uh maybe ripe for looking at as a cultural evolutionary topic. Um Because these are quite complex. I mean, this is like, you know, am I using this particular strategy or that strategy? To some extent, you have to learn it, or it's very difficult to rediscover it on your own. So I think in that circumstance, it's like, okay, yeah, you know, cultural evolution, like what are the what are the evolutionary dynamics of the idea? Um, but then also it's like, why, you know, why has this game been around for so long?

I mean, 3,000 years. It's ridiculous. Like uh and uh looking at the way in which I mean uh it's just sort of a general topic about gaming, like um what is it about games that makes them successful? I don't know. Question for David, perhaps. Like Oh, I mean, yeah, uh I would I would need you know uh many books to answer that question. It's extremely complicated. I mean, we don't really even have a good theory of what gaming is and what it's for, I feel like that that itself is an area ripe for investigation. I remember some philosopher described it as like a form of crystallized agency, like in the same way as like a painting would be crystallized seeing. It's like the you know the the essence of of what seeing is and music is like the purest

form of hearing. Um he makes the the case that gaming is like the purest form of agency, of like making decisions. And I think that's an insightful way of looking at it. But honestly, like our understanding of the evolutionary psychology of gaming and why we're why we're attracted to it, what we get from it, what the benefits are, I think that's still very mysterious and ripe for examination. I think I remember hearing from uh John Tuby when I was an undergrad that I mean the the the attractiveness of the game is that it uh it allows a certain degree of virtuosity to be possible. That you know, it's like we have to be kind of bad at the game to be able to get skill differentials. And if it's something that everybody's just amazing at, I don't know, like facial

recognition or something, you know, like it's like a talker in this in this exactly right. Look look at me go, you know. Um and so that that's something about like we want we're attracted to things that we're bad at and then turn it into a game because then people can get good, as the kids say. Interesting. Um that's interesting, Brett. That's actually that that is actually a real important part of the psychology, David, for status games is is like having a folk theory of the variability, right? Exactly, exactly right. If everybody does it, it's like, man, I'm not gonna get any status being the best breather. You know, everybody's breathing pretty well. Yeah, totally. I love that way of thinking about it.

Um, and it's and it's a particularly interesting topic, this idea of Go, because it's um it's a it's a case of of cultural evolution where you wouldn't necessarily expect it to follow the typical kinds of diffusion that are shaped by conformity. Because in a strategic uh game like Go, you don't necessarily want to copy the same strategy that everyone else is performing, because then people are going to be able to anticipate you and uh out fox you. You might want to be unpredictable and have the element of surprise, in which case you want to do something like the opposite of imitation and conformity. And that leads to a whole different set of cultural dynamics. Um and so it's it's it's a really fascinating topic.

Um and uh yeah, there's there's great paper by Igor Lapo and Mark Feldman on chess that basically looks at exactly that. That um you can think about this like a negative frequency dependence, you know, moves that are popular potentially would be things that you would want to avoid because your opponent is prepared for it, right? Um I think that's how I do okay in poker is like I get bored with playing it explicitly, so I just play implicitly and I don't even know what I'm doing. And I actually will do quite well because I'm just completely unpredictable. Yeah. So yeah. Um yeah, actually I have a paper on that, the the conformity aspect in Go. I mean, the the the trade off is that um if you start a variation that's totally

wild, uh, you could also get yourself into trouble very quickly too, because it's hard to figure out what to do next. No, no, don't know. Um and if you're I mean, it's it's a computational problem. If like people sort of know, you know, okay, the next 10 moves, if we just follow like a normal uh opening sequence, it's kind of like a, you know, it's a gentleman's agreement in some ways that like the the action's gonna start later, but we're gonna, you know, as as a truce, we're gonna continue going down this line that we both know very well. Um, at really high-level play, though. I mean, uh this is what I'm hearing from like, you know, YouTube videos and podcasts and stuff that like there's a lot of like espionage for really high you know high-stakes

matches where people want to know what their opponent is training on, like which lines are they prepared for so that they can do the opposite and use something that they're not And so it's like really high stakes to know like what people are, you know, uh ready to ready to respond on. Um I think that was the source of that controversy with Magnus Carlson uh last year, that his opponent responded to him too quickly, according to him. And he's like, Oh, you must have like cheated somehow and found out about uh found out about what I was planning to do. Yeah, you read my computer files and yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. Um so yeah, I mean that's I mean absolutely like in a strategic context, uh the the

frequency dependence here is a is a key factor. Um but uh yeah, how that how that shapes long-term evolutionary dynamics. I think that's a really cool question. Um and uh I've been spending a lot of time looking at that recently. So awesome. Well, this flew by, so we'll have to have you on again. Oh, that'd be great. I had a great time. Uh it's really interesting talking to you both. Uh well, Brett, uh, we'll uh we'll post some uh link to your website, um, which is great, and uh all the cool stuff from uh galaxies to bike tires, although um not, but you know, the uh Shimani Health Project, you know, the risk to attitudes and game of go, which is super cool. So um yeah, thank you so much. Uh have a good evening.

Thanks so much for uh for being with us in the evening here. Um Shinaband and uh yeah yeah. Yeah, thanks a lot, guys. Uh David, um when you're uh all done after a long day, um do you sometimes drink beer? Sometimes I drink beer, but uh usually what I do is I write kind reviews uh about all the podcasts that I enjoy. That's one of my favorite activities to do late at night, is I I write kind reviews about my favorite podcasts. Sometimes I just, you know, post messages on social media saying how awesome those podcasts are. And occasionally, you know, if I'm if I've had you know a few beers, I'll even go onto the Patreon pages of some of those podcasts and uh throw throw them a few a few bucks. A propos of nothing.

Yeah, it's just something I like to do. Something just kind of like that kind of person. Yeah. Yeah, that's just the kind of guy I am. Uh uh. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, we're not gonna interrogate that or question that at all. So yeah. No. Okay. No, I think we'll just uh yeah. We'll leave it at that. Okay. All right. Bye. See you next week.