The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation

By Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, Joseph Henrich. 2011

1,075 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cultural Studies

1. Erle C. Ellis
2. A. Gómez‐Robles
3. Agustín Fuentes
4. Chet C. Sherwood
5. Gary Lupyan
6. Adam Henry Marblestone
7. Alex Mesoudi
8. Curtis W. Marean

In Social Psychology

1. A. Gómez‐Robles
2. Agustín Fuentes
3. Joel Z. Leibo
4. Chet C. Sherwood
5. Gary Lupyan
6. Adam Henry Marblestone
7. Alex Mesoudi
8. Curtis W. Marean

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Erle C. Ellis
2. A. Gómez‐Robles
3. Agustín Fuentes
4. Thore Graepel
5. Joel Z. Leibo
6. Chet C. Sherwood
7. Alex Mesoudi
8. Julien Pérolat

Citations in the corpus

• Teaching in Hunter-Gatherers (2018, background): “Thus, we believe this evidence tends to support the view that humans have evolved to occupy a cultural or a socio-cognitive nichewhere having the cultural means for cooperation and communication were what set us apart from our ancestors (Boyd et al. 2011; Sterelny 2007, 2012a;Whiten andErdal 2012).”
• Malthusian Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “Human foraging communities were capable both of discovering water-finding strategies suitable for the arid Australian desert as well as how to hunt seals hiding beneath ice sheets and keep warm in the Arctic [4].”
• Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (2020, neutral): “In fact, social learning may be a central feature of humans’ unprecedented cognitive and technological development (Humphrey, 1976; Boyd et al., 2011).”
• The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Ethnography, and the Human Niche (2016, background): “The inclusion of multiple modes of inheritance (Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich 2011; Jablonka and Lamb 2005) and the possibilities of significant plasticity in response as process itself (Kuzawa and Bragg 2012; Wells and Stock 2007; WestEberhardt 2003) become necessary.”
• Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “…nonkin relationships, easily marking humans as the most ultrasocial species on Earth (Campbell 1983, Richerson and Boyd 1998, Fehr and Fischbacher 2003, Tomasello et al. 2005, Boyd and Richerson 2009, Hill et al. 2009, Boyd et al. 2011, Apicella et al. 2012, Turchin et al. 2013, Tomasello 2014).”
• The Centrality of Language in Human Cognition (2016, background): “To survive, we regularly depend on innumerable innovations made by our ancestors (Boyd et al., 2011).”