Old and Young Individuals' Role in Cultural Change

Bibliographic Data

ID15347957
AuthorsA Acerbi (0000-0001-5827-8003, corresponding author), Stefano Ghirlanda (0000-0002-7270-9612), Magnus Enquist (0000-0003-0198-1288)
Year2012
Volume15
Issue4
Publication date2012-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1460-7425 • E-ISSN: 1460-7425
PublisherJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.18564/jasss.2023
OpenAlexW2580414184
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited14

We explore the impact of age on cultural change through simulations of cultural evolution. Our simulations show that common observations about the relationship between old and young naturally emerge from repeated cultural learning. In particular, young individuals are more open to learn than older individuals, they are less effective as cultural models, and they possess less cultural traits. We also show that, being more open to learning, young individuals are an important source of cultural change. Cultural change, however, is faster in populations with both young and old. A relatively large share of older individuals, in fact, allows a population to retain more culture, and a large culture can change in more directions than a small culture. For the same reason, considering age-biased cultural transmission in an overlapping generations model, cultural evolution is slower when individuals interact preferentially with models of similar age than when they mainly interact with older models

Geography · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Language and cultural evolution · Psychology

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