Posts tagged Evolving Human-Like Culture
Semantics Derived Automatically From Language Corpora Contain Human Biases

Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, & Arvind Narayanan, Science, 356 (6334):183-186, 14 Apr 2017.

Be sure to also look at the supplement, which gives the stimuli and shows similar results for a different corpus and word-embedding model. Meaning really is no more or less than how a word is used, so AI absorbs true meaning, including prejudice. We demonstrate this empirically. This is an extension of my research programme into semantics originally deriving from my interest in the origins of human cognition, but now with help from the awesome researchers at Princeton I’ve merged this with my AI ethics work, and also managed to pitch for cognitive systems approaches to AI. Open access version: authors’ final copy of both the main article and the supplement (pdf).

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2017ScienceSitesEvolving Human-Like Culture, Ethics and Policy, Origins and Nature of Cognition
On the Reliability of Unreliable Information: Gossip as Cultural Memory

Dominic Mitchell, Joanna J. Bryson, Paul Rauwolf, and Gordon Ingram, Interaction Studies, 17:1 pp. 1–25, 2016.

There’s a tradeoff between how fast gossip spreads vs problems with its potential for corruption: it can be a lot more useful than direct experience if it spreads faster than that experience and there isn’t too much false information. Actually, in the real world gossip may give you more information than your perception, but that’s not one of the things we deal with here. This work was actually done prior to (and informed) our 2015 article Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation But Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information, but took longer to get out for a few reasons. Open access draft.

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2016ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture
Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation But Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information

Paul Rauwolf, Dominic Mitchell, and Joanna J. Bryson, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 367:246–261, 2015.

Preferring to cooperate with those with a similar cooperation style supports the evolution of cooperation. Reputations spread through gossip supports this strategy. But now that you are spreading two kinds of information (reputations of others, and your own style of cooperation) you can have a conundrum when these conflict. When there is such a conflict, signalling honestly about your cooperation strategy can be more beneficial to your community than telling the truth about someone else. Free open access draft is here. Software is coming soon. Draft is from October 2014, yet the work originally derived from On the Reliability of Unreliable Information: Gossip as Cultural Memory, which came out in 2016. Such is academia.

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2015ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture, Cultural Variation in Cooperation
Understanding and Addressing Cultural Variation in Costly Antisocial Punishment (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson, James Mitchell, Simon T. Powers, and Karolina Sylwester, in Applied Evolutionary Anthropology: Darwinian Approaches to Contemporary World Issues, Gibson & Lawson (eds.), Springer, 2014.

This book follows from a workshop. Here is a free version of the chapter, the revised draft from May 2013. See further our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page. Note: Google Scholar managed to find a USAF white paper derived from our final report by the same title which has a lot of irrelevant detail and a couple theoretical errors we’ve since discovered. The book chapter is 15 months more recent.

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2014ScienceSitesCultural Variation in Cooperation, Evolving Human-Like Culture, Origins and Nature of Cognition
The Role of Stability in Cultural Evolution: Innovation and Conformity in Implicit Knowledge Discovery

Joanna J. Bryson, book chapter in Perspectives on Culture and Agent-Based Simulations, Virginia and Frank Dignum, (eds), Springer, Berlin 2014.

Some simple simulations of culture and modularity showing interesting stability effects, inspired by a talk Dan Sperber gave in 2008. Open access draft from 2010. Open source netlogo model described in the paper on the AmonI Software Page.

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2014ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture
Measuring Cultural Relativity of Emotional Valence and Arousal using Semantic Clustering and Twitter

Eugene Y. Bann and Joanna J. Bryson, Proceedings of Cognitive Science, 2013.

Considers the most common “emotion” keywords on Twitter, and discovers that some concepts, e.g. sleepiness and sadness, are relatively culturally invariant, but others like “surprise” and “stressed” seem to be used quite differently in different global regions. Also, Europeans are the most positive and excited tweeters. Camera-ready from April 2013.

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2013ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture, Emotions and Affect
Punishment Can Promote Defection in Group-Structured Populations

Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 311:107-116, 2012.

Penultimate version on arXiv. This paper shows that punishment alone can’t explain altruism, the papers that thought it could didn’t take into account the well-documented behaviour of anti-social punishment. Basically, some people punish those that contribute to the public good. This is the first article of at least five we expect to publish explaining this phenomenon, and why it varies by culture. See our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page.

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2012ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture, Cultural Variation in Cooperation
Cultural Ratcheting Results Primarily from Semantic Compression (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson, from The Proceedings of Evolution of Language 2010, Smith, Schouwstra, de Boer & Smith (eds.) pp. 50-57.

Discriminates the size of a culture (how much information can be transmitted from one generation to the next) from its extent (how much useful behaviour can be generated) and argues that the vast majority of cultural ratcheting is because the size of human culture finally got large enough that cultural evolution could start increasing its extent.

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2010ScienceSitesEvolving Human-Like Culture, Origins and Nature of Cognition
Embodiment vs. Memetics

Joanna J. Bryson, in Mind & Society, 7(1):77-94, May 2008.

Discusses the importance of the discovery that human-like semantics can be learned simply from observing large corpora, with ramifications for the evolution of language. The final version is from November 2007, here is a penultimate draft (pdf) from August for those who do not subscribe, although it has a couple gaffs in it.

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2008ScienceSitesEvolving Human-Like Culture, Origins and Nature of Cognition
Agent Based Modelling of Communication Costs: Why Information Can Be Free (pdf)

Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson, in Emergence of Communication and Language on Springer, edited by Caroline Lyon, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and Angelo Cangelosi, 2007.

Shows that the tendency to communicate information can be adaptive even though it has immediate costs to the communicators and there are free riders / information hoarders around the place. A chapter-length extension of Cace & Bryson ’05. Version from early March 2006.

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2007ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Human-Like Culture