Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying
By R. Bentley, Carl Philipp Lipo, H. Herzog, Matthew W. Hahn. 2007
168 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Almost by definition, “popular culture” reflects the effects of most people imitating those around them. At the same time, trends and fashions are constantly changing, with future outcomes potentially irrational and nearly impossible to predict. A simple null model, which captures these seemingly conflicting tendencies of conformity and change, involves the random copying of cultural variants between individuals, with occasional innovation. Here, we show that the random-copying model predicts a continual flux of initially obscure new ideas (analogous to mutations) becoming highly popular by chance alone, such that the turnover rate on a list of most popular variants depends on the list size and the amount of innovation but not on population size. We also present evidence for remarkably regular turnover on “pop charts”—including the most popular music, first names, and dog breeds in 20th-century United States—which fits this expectation. By predicting parametric effects on the turnover of popular fashion, the random-copying model provides an additional means of characterizing collective copying behavior in culture evolution.
Subfields: Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbdc9c7f0b5b0ec36661607a45422d06ca076d67
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Citations in the corpus
- A demographic model for Palaeolithic technological evolution: The case of East Asia and the Movius Line (2010, methodology): “…of population genetics being applied to cultural data (CavalliSforza and Feldman, 1981; Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Neiman, 1995; Shennan, 2001, 2006; Bentley et al., 2004, 2007; Richerson and Boyd, 2005; Lycett and von Cramon-Taubadel, 2008; Lycett, 2008; Shennan and Bentley, 2008; Mesoudi and…”
- Social network markets: a new definition of the creative industries (2008, background): “26 Recently, there has been considerable growth of research into complex networks in social and economic systems that has developed analysis of, among other things, random networks (Bentley et al. 2007), small world networks 27 and scale-free networks.”
- Three decades of cultural evolution in Savannah sparrow songs (2013, background): “The neutral model is consistent with the evolution of many cultural changes: the popularity of pottery types in Neolithic Germany (Bentley et al. 2007), chaffinch, Fringilla coelebs, songs in the Azore and Canary Islands (Lynch 1996), and the unaccented song types of chestnut-sided warblers, Dendroi”