A V Bell
Biographic Data
| ID | 46197 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A V Bell |
| GIVEN NAMES | A V |
| FAMILY NAME | Bell |
| SIGNATURE | BELL A V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Utah |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4670-384X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies
Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultane…
Why cultural distance can promote – or impede – group-beneficial outcomes
Quantifying the distance between cultural groups has received substantial recent interest. A key innovation, borrowed from population genetics, is the calculation of cultural F ST ( CF ST ) statistics on datasets of human culture. Measuring the variance between groups as a fraction of total variance, F ST is theoretically important in additive models of cooperation. Consistent with this, recent empirical work has confirmed that high values of pai…
Evidence for Greater Marking along Ethnic Boundaries
Selection and adaptation in human migration
This article reviews the ways migration shapes human biology. This includes the physiological and genetic, but also socio‐cultural aspects such as organization, behavior, and culture. Across disciplines I highlight the multiple levels of cultural and genetic selection whereby individuals and groups adapt to pressures along a migration timeline: the origin, transit, and destination. Generally, the evidence suggests that selective pressures and ada…
Ethnic Markers and How to Find Them: An Ethnographic Investigation of Marker Presence, Recognition, and Social Information
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (Weird) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from …
A measure of social coordination and group signaling in the wild
Production of a sign for a new health center in the Kingdom of Tonga. Note the cultural significant motifs, or kupesi , comprising the border
The only way for minority cultural survival
Applying a cultural multilevel selection framework to the adoption of sustainable management practices in California viticulture
In light of the ongoing environmental impacts of agriculture, understanding farmer adoption of sustainable management practices (SMPs) is an important priority. Relatively little work in agricultural adoption has explicitly examined the multilevel dynamics of adoption decision-making. Yet because many SMPs involve cooperative dilemmas-they are individually costly but provide group benefits-understanding the dynamics of both individual and group l…
Cooperative Learning Groups and the Evolution of Human Adaptability: (Another Reason) Why Hermits Are Rare in Tonga and Elsewhere
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania: Developing Island-Level Statistical Models to Test Competing Hypotheses
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Linking Observed Learning Patterns to the Evolution of Cultural Complexity
Demographic effects on cultural complexity are controversial. Some view the arguments for cultural drift and similar mechanisms as overstating the importance of difficulty in learning, socially or individually. Others stress that social learning is vital, and larger social groups with active cultural transmission yield greater cultural complexity. Using ethnographic data collected among women weavers in the South Pacific, I advance the debate by …
The Population Ecology of Despotism: Concessions and Migration Between Central and Peripheral Habitats
Ethnic dominance damages cooperation more than ethnic diversity: Results from multi-ethnic field experiments in India
The dynamics of culture lost and conserved: Demic migration as a force in new diaspora communities
The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts
Collection examining the Anglo-Norman language in a variety of texts and contexts, in military, legal, literary and other forms.
Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists: Foundations of Agrarian Inequality
This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality i…
Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality
Whether competition among large groups played an important role in human social evolution is dependent on how variation, whether cultural or genetic, is maintained between groups. Comparisons between genetic and cultural differentiation between neighboring groups show how natural selection on large groups is more plausible on cultural rather than genetic variation.
Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists: Foundations of Agrarian Inequality
This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality i…
The Population Ecology of Despotism: Concessions and Migration Between Central and Peripheral Habitats
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania: Developing Island-Level Statistical Models to Test Competing Hypotheses
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Linking Observed Learning Patterns to the Evolution of Cultural Complexity
Demographic effects on cultural complexity are controversial. Some view the arguments for cultural drift and similar mechanisms as overstating the importance of difficulty in learning, socially or individually. Others stress that social learning is vital, and larger social groups with active cultural transmission yield greater cultural complexity. Using ethnographic data collected among women weavers in the South Pacific, I advance the debate by …
A measure of social coordination and group signaling in the wild
Production of a sign for a new health center in the Kingdom of Tonga. Note the cultural significant motifs, or kupesi , comprising the border
Why cultural distance can promote – or impede – group-beneficial outcomes
Quantifying the distance between cultural groups has received substantial recent interest. A key innovation, borrowed from population genetics, is the calculation of cultural F ST ( CF ST ) statistics on datasets of human culture. Measuring the variance between groups as a fraction of total variance, F ST is theoretically important in additive models of cooperation. Consistent with this, recent empirical work has confirmed that high values of pai…
Ethnic Markers and How to Find Them: An Ethnographic Investigation of Marker Presence, Recognition, and Social Information
The only way for minority cultural survival
Cooperative Learning Groups and the Evolution of Human Adaptability: (Another Reason) Why Hermits Are Rare in Tonga and Elsewhere
Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality
Whether competition among large groups played an important role in human social evolution is dependent on how variation, whether cultural or genetic, is maintained between groups. Comparisons between genetic and cultural differentiation between neighboring groups show how natural selection on large groups is more plausible on cultural rather than genetic variation.
The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts
Collection examining the Anglo-Norman language in a variety of texts and contexts, in military, legal, literary and other forms.
Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists: Foundations of Agrarian Inequality
This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality i…
Ethnic dominance damages cooperation more than ethnic diversity: Results from multi-ethnic field experiments in India
The dynamics of culture lost and conserved: Demic migration as a force in new diaspora communities
The Population Ecology of Despotism: Concessions and Migration Between Central and Peripheral Habitats
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania: Developing Island-Level Statistical Models to Test Competing Hypotheses
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Linking Observed Learning Patterns to the Evolution of Cultural Complexity
Demographic effects on cultural complexity are controversial. Some view the arguments for cultural drift and similar mechanisms as overstating the importance of difficulty in learning, socially or individually. Others stress that social learning is vital, and larger social groups with active cultural transmission yield greater cultural complexity. Using ethnographic data collected among women weavers in the South Pacific, I advance the debate by …
Applying a cultural multilevel selection framework to the adoption of sustainable management practices in California viticulture
In light of the ongoing environmental impacts of agriculture, understanding farmer adoption of sustainable management practices (SMPs) is an important priority. Relatively little work in agricultural adoption has explicitly examined the multilevel dynamics of adoption decision-making. Yet because many SMPs involve cooperative dilemmas-they are individually costly but provide group benefits-understanding the dynamics of both individual and group l…
Cooperative Learning Groups and the Evolution of Human Adaptability: (Another Reason) Why Hermits Are Rare in Tonga and Elsewhere
The only way for minority cultural survival
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (Weird) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from …
A measure of social coordination and group signaling in the wild
Production of a sign for a new health center in the Kingdom of Tonga. Note the cultural significant motifs, or kupesi , comprising the border
Ethnic Markers and How to Find Them: An Ethnographic Investigation of Marker Presence, Recognition, and Social Information
Selection and adaptation in human migration
This article reviews the ways migration shapes human biology. This includes the physiological and genetic, but also socio‐cultural aspects such as organization, behavior, and culture. Across disciplines I highlight the multiple levels of cultural and genetic selection whereby individuals and groups adapt to pressures along a migration timeline: the origin, transit, and destination. Generally, the evidence suggests that selective pressures and ada…
Why cultural distance can promote – or impede – group-beneficial outcomes
Quantifying the distance between cultural groups has received substantial recent interest. A key innovation, borrowed from population genetics, is the calculation of cultural F ST ( CF ST ) statistics on datasets of human culture. Measuring the variance between groups as a fraction of total variance, F ST is theoretically important in additive models of cooperation. Consistent with this, recent empirical work has confirmed that high values of pai…
Evidence for Greater Marking along Ethnic Boundaries
The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies
Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultane…
Psychology (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Biology (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Economic geography (5 works) · Economics (5 works)