C Efferson
Biographic Data
| ID | 5010 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Efferson |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Efferson |
| SIGNATURE | EFFERSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lausanne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8244-4497 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The cover of randomness: Validating Implicit Methods for the Study of Sensitive Topics
We review the methods we developed to study female genital cutting in Sudan and sex-selective abortion in Armenia. These methods were untested at the time of our original research, and here we compare the distinct but overlapping approaches we used to validate our methods for each of the two countries. Additionally, we repeat a number of analyses, including those related to validation, with previously unpublished data from Sudan. All results repl…
Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia
A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data…
How culture shapes choices related to fertility and mortality: Causal evidence at the Swiss language border
Results from cultural evolutionary theory often suggest that social learning can lead cultural groups to differ markedly in the same environment. Put differently, cultural evolutionary processes can in principle stabilise behavioural differences between groups, which in turn could lead selection pressures to vary across cultural groups. Separating the effects of culture from other confounds, however, is often a daunting and sometimes intractable …
Identifying culture as cause: Challenges and opportunities
Causal inference lies at the core of many scientific endeavours. Yet answering causal questions is challenging, especially when studying culture as a causal force. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews research designs and statistical tools that can be used – together with strong theory and knowledge about the context of study – to identify the causal impact of culture on outcomes of interest. We especially discuss how overlooked strategies i…
Pre-existing fairness concerns restrict the cultural evolution and generalization of inequitable norms in children
What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space
Models of frequency-dependent social learning posit that individuals respond to the commonality of behaviours without additional variables modifying this. Such strategies bring important trade-offs e.g., conformity is beneficial when observing people facing the same task but harmful when observing those facing a different task. Instead of rigidly responding to frequencies, however, social learners might modulate their response given additional in…
Group identities can undermine social tipping after intervention
Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data
False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think, but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies, and identify a novel mechanism w…
Tipping pro-environmental norm diffusion at scale: Opportunities and limitations
Rapid and comprehensive social change is required to mitigate pressing environmental issues such as climate change. Social tipping interventions have been proposed as a policy tool for creating this kind of change. Social tipping means that a small minority committed to a target behaviour can create a self-reinforcing dynamic, which establishes the target behaviour as a social norm. The possibility of achieving the large-scale diffusion of pro-en…
Investigating the Structure of Son Bias in Armenia With Novel Measures of Individual Preferences
Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring son bias using both questionnaire items and implicit association tests, and we collect data on fert…
The evolution of distorted beliefs vs. mistaken choices under asymmetric error costs
Why do people sometimes hold unjustified beliefs and make harmful choices? Three hypotheses include (a) contemporary incentives in which some errors cost more than others, (b) cognitive biases evolved to manage ancestral incentives with variation in error costs and (c) social learning based on choice frequencies. With both modelling and a behavioural experiment, we examined all three mechanisms. The model and experiment support the conclusion tha…
The promise and the peril of using social influence to reverse harmful traditions
Economic Psychology
Economic psychology refers to the psychological processes that affect economic decision making. The study of economic psychology has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent years, with growing influence in economics, anthropology, and other social sciences. A rise in the use of behavioral experiments, in particular, has led researchers to revise the economic model of choice extensively by incorporating empirically grounded insights about …
The error of God, revisited
One-shot reciprocity under error management is unbiased and fragile
The risk of female genital cutting in Europe: Comparing immigrant attitudes toward uncut girls with attitudes in a practicing country
Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where cutting is commonly practiced to countries where cutting is not trad…
Redefine statistical significance
Sustained cooperation by running away from bad behavior
For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary mechanisms can explain the extraordinary cooperation exhibited by humans. Much of the controversy follows from disagreements about the informational regularity…
Eye spots do not increase altruism in children
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Can we see inside? Predicting strategic behavior given limited information
The subtleties of error management
Learning, productivity, and noise: An experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano
Conformists and mavericks: The empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission☆
New Methods in Quantitative Ethnography: Economic Experiments and Variation in the Price of Equality
A new method for quantitatively documenting concerns for economic fairness has the potential for identifying variation in prosociality within and across societies. Multiple dictator games conducted in two small-scale societies presented decision makers with a choice between an equitable and an inequitable payoff distribution. The games varied in terms of the type of inequality the decision maker faced and the cost to the decision maker of elimina…
Redefine statistical significance
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
The promise and the peril of using social influence to reverse harmful traditions
Identifying culture as cause: Challenges and opportunities
Causal inference lies at the core of many scientific endeavours. Yet answering causal questions is challenging, especially when studying culture as a causal force. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews research designs and statistical tools that can be used – together with strong theory and knowledge about the context of study – to identify the causal impact of culture on outcomes of interest. We especially discuss how overlooked strategies i…
Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia
A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data…
What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space
Models of frequency-dependent social learning posit that individuals respond to the commonality of behaviours without additional variables modifying this. Such strategies bring important trade-offs e.g., conformity is beneficial when observing people facing the same task but harmful when observing those facing a different task. Instead of rigidly responding to frequencies, however, social learners might modulate their response given additional in…
Tipping pro-environmental norm diffusion at scale: Opportunities and limitations
Rapid and comprehensive social change is required to mitigate pressing environmental issues such as climate change. Social tipping interventions have been proposed as a policy tool for creating this kind of change. Social tipping means that a small minority committed to a target behaviour can create a self-reinforcing dynamic, which establishes the target behaviour as a social norm. The possibility of achieving the large-scale diffusion of pro-en…
Investigating the Structure of Son Bias in Armenia With Novel Measures of Individual Preferences
Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring son bias using both questionnaire items and implicit association tests, and we collect data on fert…
Cultural evolution in laboratory microsocieties including traditions of rule giving and rule following
Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning
Learning, productivity, and noise: An experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano
Conformists and mavericks: The empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission☆
New Methods in Quantitative Ethnography: Economic Experiments and Variation in the Price of Equality
A new method for quantitatively documenting concerns for economic fairness has the potential for identifying variation in prosociality within and across societies. Multiple dictator games conducted in two small-scale societies presented decision makers with a choice between an equitable and an inequitable payoff distribution. The games varied in terms of the type of inequality the decision maker faced and the cost to the decision maker of elimina…
The subtleties of error management
Can we see inside? Predicting strategic behavior given limited information
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Eye spots do not increase altruism in children
Sustained cooperation by running away from bad behavior
For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary mechanisms can explain the extraordinary cooperation exhibited by humans. Much of the controversy follows from disagreements about the informational regularity…
One-shot reciprocity under error management is unbiased and fragile
The risk of female genital cutting in Europe: Comparing immigrant attitudes toward uncut girls with attitudes in a practicing country
Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where cutting is commonly practiced to countries where cutting is not trad…
Redefine statistical significance
Economic Psychology
Economic psychology refers to the psychological processes that affect economic decision making. The study of economic psychology has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent years, with growing influence in economics, anthropology, and other social sciences. A rise in the use of behavioral experiments, in particular, has led researchers to revise the economic model of choice extensively by incorporating empirically grounded insights about …
The error of God, revisited
The promise and the peril of using social influence to reverse harmful traditions
The evolution of distorted beliefs vs. mistaken choices under asymmetric error costs
Why do people sometimes hold unjustified beliefs and make harmful choices? Three hypotheses include (a) contemporary incentives in which some errors cost more than others, (b) cognitive biases evolved to manage ancestral incentives with variation in error costs and (c) social learning based on choice frequencies. With both modelling and a behavioural experiment, we examined all three mechanisms. The model and experiment support the conclusion tha…
Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data
False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think, but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies, and identify a novel mechanism w…
Tipping pro-environmental norm diffusion at scale: Opportunities and limitations
Rapid and comprehensive social change is required to mitigate pressing environmental issues such as climate change. Social tipping interventions have been proposed as a policy tool for creating this kind of change. Social tipping means that a small minority committed to a target behaviour can create a self-reinforcing dynamic, which establishes the target behaviour as a social norm. The possibility of achieving the large-scale diffusion of pro-en…
Investigating the Structure of Son Bias in Armenia With Novel Measures of Individual Preferences
Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring son bias using both questionnaire items and implicit association tests, and we collect data on fert…
Pre-existing fairness concerns restrict the cultural evolution and generalization of inequitable norms in children
What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space
Models of frequency-dependent social learning posit that individuals respond to the commonality of behaviours without additional variables modifying this. Such strategies bring important trade-offs e.g., conformity is beneficial when observing people facing the same task but harmful when observing those facing a different task. Instead of rigidly responding to frequencies, however, social learners might modulate their response given additional in…
Group identities can undermine social tipping after intervention
Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia
A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data…
How culture shapes choices related to fertility and mortality: Causal evidence at the Swiss language border
Results from cultural evolutionary theory often suggest that social learning can lead cultural groups to differ markedly in the same environment. Put differently, cultural evolutionary processes can in principle stabilise behavioural differences between groups, which in turn could lead selection pressures to vary across cultural groups. Separating the effects of culture from other confounds, however, is often a daunting and sometimes intractable …
Psychology (24 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (6 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (6 works)