Alex Mesoudi
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    • Variable cultural acquisition costs may explain contextual variation in peer cultures. A comment on Lew-Levy and Amir
    • Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans
    • Testing evolutionary theories of human cooperation via meta-analysis of microfinance repayment
    • From information free-riding to information sharing: how have humans solved the cooperative dilemma at the heart of cumulative cultural evolution?
    • Testing the effect of circumscription on the evolution of social complexity in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, using agent-based models
    • Social learning preserves both useful and useless theories by canalizing learners' exploration
    • A formal test using agent-based models of the circumscription theory for the evolution of social complexity
    • Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution
    • Cultural evolution
    • Decoding the dynamics of cultural change: A cultural evolution approach to the psychology of acculturation
    • Experimental studies of cultural evolution
    • Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation
    • Untenable propositions and alternative avenues. Comment on “Blind alleys and fruitful pathways in the comparative study of cultural cognition” by Andrew Whiten.
    • Sentiment analysis of the Twitter response to Netflix's Our Planet documentary
    • Simulation models of cultural evolution in R [online tutorial]
    • Individual-based models of cultural evolution: A step-by-step guide using R
    • Trusting the experts: The domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning
    • Analogy as a catalyst for cumulative cultural evolution
    • What is cumulative culture, and how should it be tested? A comment on Vaesen and Houkes
    • Banking on cooperation: An evolutionary analysis of microfinance loan repayment behaviour
    • Blind and incremental or directed and disruptive? On the nature of novel variation in human cultural evolution.
    • Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution
    • When do people prefer dominant over prestigious political leaders?
    • The cultural transmission of prestige and dominance social rank cues: An experimental simulation
    • Cumulative cultural evolution within evolving population structures
    • Prestige does not affect the cultural transmission of novel controversial arguments in an online transmission chain experiment
    • The emergence and adaptive use of prestige in an online social learning task
    • No evidence that omission and confirmation biases affect the perception and recall of vaccine-related information
    • Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers’ choice of formation
    • Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R
    • The study of culture and evolution across disciplines
    • Understanding agriculture within the frameworks of cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, and cultural niche construction
    • Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology
    • Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions
    • Cultural evolution and cultural psychology
    • Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics
    • Prestige and dominance-based hierarchies exist in naturally occurring human groups, but are unrelated to task-specific knowledge
    • Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation
    • What is cumulative cultural evolution?
    • Cultural Evolution
    • Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution
    • Differences in manufacturing traditions and assemblage-level patterns: The origins of cultural differences in archaeological data
    • Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally variable psychological processes
    • The nature and development of mathematics: Cross disciplinary perspectives on cognition, learning and culture
    • Cultural evolution: a review of theory, findings and controversies
    • Multilevel processes and cultural adaptation: Examples from past and present small-scale societies
    • Social learning solves the problem of narrow-peaked search landscapes: experimental evidence in humans
    • Evolving the human niche
    • Factors affecting Acheulean handaxe variation: Experimental insights, microevolutionary processes, and macroevolutionary outcomes
    • Copying error, evolution, and phylogenetic signal in artifactual traditions: An experimental approach using model artifacts
    • Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals
    • The evolution of individual and cultural variation in social learning
    • Cultural evolution: Integrating psychology, evolution and culture
    • How do people become W.E.I.R.D.? Migration reveals the cultural transmission mechanisms underlying variation in psychological processes
    • Understanding cumulative cultural evolution
    • The impact of imitative versus emulative learning mechanisms on artifactual variation: implications for the evolution of material culture
    • If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution
    • Do online voting patterns reflect evolved features of human cognition? An exploratory empirical investigation
    • Cultural Evolution Overview
    • Higher frequency of social learning in China than in the West shows cultural variation in the dynamics of cultural evolution
    • Introduction to "Learning strategies and cultural evolution during the Palaeolithic"
    • Learning in the Acheulean: Experimental insights using handaxe form as a model organism
    • Learning strategies and cultural evolution during the palaeolithic
    • Transmission of cultural variants in the North American Paleolithic
    • From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: Parameterizing the differences between human and nonhuman culture
    • An experimental demonstration of the effect of group size on cultural accumulation
    • Considering the role of time budgets on copy-error rates in material culture traditions: An experimental assessment
    • Experimental and theoretical models of human cultural evolution
    • Cultural evolution in more than two dimensions: Distinguishing social learning biases and identifying payoff structures. A comment on Bentley et al. (2014)
    • Copying error and the cultural evolution of additive vs. reductive material traditions: An experimental assessment
    • Experimental studies of modern human social and individual learning in an archaeological context: People behave adaptively, but within limits
    • Sex-biased sound symbolism in English-language first names
    • Mass shooting and mass media : does media coverage of mass shootings inspire copycat crimes?
    • Is non-genetic inheritance just a proximate mechanism? A corroboration of the extended evolutionary synthesis
    • Making sense of culture. Book review of Culture Evolves by Whiten et al.
    • Studying cultural transmission within an interdisciplinary cultural evolutionary framework
    • The cultural evolution of technology and science
    • An experimental test of the accumulated copying error model of cultural mutation for Acheulean handaxe size
    • Adult learners in a novel environment use prestige-biased social learning
    • Culture and the evolution of human sociality
    • Statistical analyses cannot be divorced from archaeological theory: A reply to Potter (2012)
    • An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused
    • Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences
    • Beyond DNA: integrating inclusive inheritance into an extended theory of evolution
    • Culture and the Darwinian Renaissance in the social sciences and humanities
    • Integrating genetic and cultural evolutionary approaches to language
    • Variable cultural acquisition costs constrain cumulative cultural evolution
    • Cultural traits as units of analysis
    • Evolutionary synthesis in the social sciences and humanities
    • Studying cultural innovation in the psychology lab
    • Why aren't the social sciences Darwinian?
    • The cultural dynamics of copycat suicide
    • How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology and vice versa
    • Placing archaeology within a unified science of cultural evolution
    • Random copying, frequency-dependent copying and culture change
    • NERD and norms: Framework and experiments
    • Establishing an experimental science of culture: animal social diffusion experiments
    • An experimental simulation of the 'copy-successful-individuals' cultural learning strategy: adaptive landscapes, producer–scrounger dynamics, and informational access costs
    • Ethics, evolution and culture
    • Foresight in cultural evolution
    • The cultural transmission of Great Basin projectile point technology I: An experimental simulation
    • The cultural transmission of Great Basin projectile-point technology II: an agent-based computer simulation
    • The experimental study of cultural transmission and its potential for explaining archaeological data
    • The learning and transmission of hierarchical cultural recipes
    • The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution
    • A Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can promote an evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences
    • Has mental time travel really affected human culture? A comment on Suddendorf and Corballis (2007)
    • Culturally transmitted paternity beliefs and the evolution of human mating behaviour
    • Biological and cultural evolution: Similar but different
    • Extended evolutionary theory makes human culture more amenable to evolutionary analysis. A comment on Jablonka and Lamb (2007)
    • Extending the behavioral sciences framework: Clarification of methods, predictions and concepts. A comment on Gintis (2007)
    • Science, evolution and cultural anthropology: A response to Ingold (2007)
    • Using the methods of social psychology to study cultural evolution
    • A bias for social information in human cultural transmission
    • Towards a unified science of cultural evolution
    • The transmission and evolution of human culture
    • Is human cultural evolution Darwinian? Evidence reviewed from the perspective of The Origin of Species
    • The hierarchical transformation of event knowledge in human cultural transmission

Variable cultural acquisition costs may explain contextual variation in peer cultures. A comment on Lew-Levy and Amir

Jul 6, 2026·
Alex Mesoudi
Alex Mesoudi
· 0 min read
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Type
Journal article
Publication
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 49, e241
Last updated on Jul 6, 2026
Alex Mesoudi
Authors
Alex Mesoudi
Professor of Cultural Evolution
Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans Jun 24, 2026 →

© 2026 Alex Mesoudi. This work is licensed under CC BY NC ND 4.0

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