Japan

Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than non-populist leaders, and right-wing populist/dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper, we explore and critique this application of dominance–prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance–prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup–outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference not only for dominant leaders, but also for prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and those who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump&#39;s success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

When do people prefer dominant over prestigious political leaders?

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

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* **Society Creation**<br>
The Society was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional organization in Massachusetts in 1979. The organizing committee included Roger Schank, Allan Collins, Donald Norman, and a number of other scholars from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. 
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* **Conference Creation**<br>
The first conference on cognitive science was held at La Jolla, California in August, 1979, and has occurred annually since then. The proceedings of each conference are published, and those from most years are available through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The annual proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference represent a major source of information on new work and new ideas in the scientific study of thinking. In 1990, the Society, with help from an anonymous donor, established the David Marr Prize for the best student paper at each annual meeting.
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The Journal, Cognitive Science, began publication in 1976, and is now published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Executive Editor is currently Richard P. Cooper of Birkbeck, University of London, and there are 18 Associate Editors and a 30-member editorial board. It serves as the premier outlet for research reports that intersect two or more disciplines. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society. The Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society voted in late 2006 to found a new journal, Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS). The Editor in Chief is Wayne Gray, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The journal seeks to fill a niche not occupied by Cognitive Science Journal or other cognitive science journals. Membership in the Society includes a subscription to Cognitive Science and TopiCS. Copyrights for articles published in the journal are held by the Society.
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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than non-populist leaders, and right-wing populist/dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper, we explore and critique this application of dominance–prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance–prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup–outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference not only for dominant leaders, but also for prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and those who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump's success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.

technical paper

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

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[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
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See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
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In a laboratory experiment with human participants, we investigated the evolution of category systems in terms of their optimality and complexity over time. We contrast two evolutionary scenarios: one where category systems are passed between individuals in a serial transmission chain and another where the systems are developed within single learners. Crucially, in both cases we control for the evolutionary age of the category systems, allowing systems developed by individual learners to be iterated the same number of times as those developed among several learners (see for discussion Miton & Charbonneau, 2018). We find that both evolutionary regimes discover a similar number of unique category systems, but individual learning discovers and maintains more complex systems than cultural transmission does. Cultural transmission, on the other hand, discovers simpler systems that are optimized to be easily learnable, and therefore transmitted among different individuals with high fidelity. This result runs opposite to our field's received notion that artifact complexity is a hallmark of cumulative cultural evolution (e.g. Boyd & Richerson, 1996). There are deep mathematical similarities between evolution and learning (Suchow et al, 2017) that allow us to analyze individual learning and cultural evolution within one framework and refine our understanding of the diagnostic differences between the two.

The cumulative cultural evolution of category systems: when individual learning creates more complex artifacts

Objective: It has been argued that teaching promotes the accurate transmission of cultural traits and eventually leads to cumulative cultural evolution. However, several previous studies have provided a disclaim to the argument. In the current study, we constructed a computational model of social learning under teaching to demonstrate that teaching plays a causal role in the emergence of cumulative cultural evolution. We also examined the conditions teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.

Methods: Processes of acquiring complex technologies were modeled as a search problem in a complex random network with multiple goals. The reinforcement learning agents searched for better goals and taught their experiences to agents in the next generation. In the simulation, we implemented a trade-off between individual learning (an opportunity for innovation) and teaching (the processes of faithful transmission): long periods of teaching are required for accurate transmission of advanced technologies. However, the more extended time society invests in teaching, the less time is left for innovating advanced technologies by the younger generation.

Results: Agent-based simulations revealed that the task difficulty moderates the positive influences of teaching on the cumulative cultural evolution: when the task was too difficult and advanced technologies could not be acquired by individual learning within a lifetime, spending a longer time on teaching, even at the expense of time for innovation, contributed to cumulative cultural evolution. On the contrary, the easier the task, the more time spent on innovation instead of teaching contributed to improving performance.

Conditions under which long-term teaching contributes to the cumulative cultural evolution of technology

Cultural attractor landscapes describe the time-evolution of cultural variants (i.e. behaviors, artifacts) over successive transmission events. When cultural variants sit at a local minimum of a stable attractor landscape, there will be no cumulative error over transmissions, allowing Darwinian selectionist dynamics to drive cumulative cultural evolution. But because cultural attractors are the emergent products of shifting populations (individuals can leave or die, and new individuals can be born or enter the population) of individuals with potentially-idiosyncratic and dynamic cognitive landscapes, which are in turn the emergent products of individual experience within a culture, stable cultural attractor landscapes cannot be taken for granted. Little is known about how cultural attractors form or stabilize in light of this culture-cognition feedback loop. We present a model of cultural attractor dynamics, which adapts a cognitive model of unsupervised learning of phoneme categories in individual learners to a multi-agent setting wherein individual learners are tasked with categorizing and generating signals for one another. Beginning from a state in which all agents possess a set of randomly distributed categories of uniform probability, under some conditions populations self-organize into signal clusters, which constitute an identifiable cultural attractor landscape. We explore the role of various innate cognitive biases, levels of transmission error, learning periods, lifespans, population sizes, and network structures to understand when population-level structure may emerge, what properties it is likely to have, and how stable it is. Our analyses can provide insights into the conditions that may be favorable or unfavorable for cumulative culture to emerge.

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment

Achieving sustainability is as much about knowing what defines sustainability as it is about doing the right thing. Without complete information about global stock levels, ecological tipping points, resource dynamics, societal metabolism, enforcement costs, etc., an enlightened citizen or social planner cannot define the strategy space that constitutes sustainable action. We break from traditional modelling approaches, which assume the conditions for sustainability are known. Using an agent-based model, we investigate the evolution knowledge about the sustainable courses of action in a common-pool resource dilemma. Our models show that the structure of the resource, that is, the set of parameter governing it, in conjunction with sufficient inter-group variation in cultural beliefs, is critical to the evolution of sustainability. Specifically, sustainability can evolve if the resource maximizes the difference between sustainable cooperative outcomes and non-cooperative unsustainable outcomes. Nevertheless, we find that this equilibrium is seldom found before an initial collapse.

Resource Characteristics and the Evolution of Sustainability

The patriarchal system is hegemonic in the contemporary world. In this study we aimed at understanding the causes of this prevalence, investigating the evolutionary origins of patriarchy. Our question was whether the masculine philopatry is related to the maintenance of the patriarchal structure. We conducted an integrative bibliographic review of the ethological literature, emphasizing the development of feminist concepts about patriarchy and the parental preferences on species evolutionarily close to humans. In addition, we analysed matrilineal communities such as Minangkabau, located at Indonesia, Asia; Mosuo, at China, Asia; and Umoja, at Quenia, Africa; and also two Brazilian social groups with traces of matriarchy, denominated Noiva do Cordeiro and Quebradeiras de Coco, for current alternatives that have dissociated from the prevailing patriarchy. In particular, Umoja and Noiva do Cordeiro were created in response to the preponderant sexism and violence suffered by its founders and other women, who came together to remodel their future actively. The ethological analysis allowed understanding the emergence of patriarchy, showing some socio-cultural contexts, such as sedentarism, language and parental preference, in certain cultures, as promoting its formation. Throughout this research, it was also noticeable that the number of scientific and academic studies on non-patriarchal societies, mainly in the scope of ethology, is quite little. Overall, the present study reveals a contrast between the patriarchy and distinct contemporary social configurations which have detached from feminine subordination, evincing that it is possible for our social systems to change and that we can carry out such transformation, as we understand and reflect about these processes.

Patriarchal hegemony from an ethological perspective and other social systems

Evolutionary theory supports the development of scientific explanations of the biological, behavioral, cognitive, and cultural diversity found around the world. Despite the wide ranging interdisciplinary nature of evolution science, evolution education in the general education context remains almost exclusively within the domain of the biology classroom. To engage this challenge and opportunity in a systematic fashion, the OpenEvo project has emerged as a Networked Improvement Community for evolving an open, networked, and interdisciplinary evolution education research community. The network is organized around principles of sociocratic governance, and focused on creating the conditions for innovations in interdisciplinary evolution education to emerge and thrive. The Concepts & Theory Circle has begun a critical analysis of the internationally recognized Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework for guiding evolution teaching across K-16 (general education and undergraduate) contexts. The Research Circle is working to develop novel assessment tools for measuring conceptual learning about evolution as an interdisciplinary science, and the supports needed to engage in empirical research on the proposed revisions to the Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework. The Teacher Education Circle is working to develop open syllabi for model teacher education courses and professional development programs to support teaching evolution as an interdisciplinary science. We will highlight the challenges and opportunities presented by this work, describe the current state of core projects within the network, and discuss the potential for teaching cultural evolution science to emerge as an essential educational innovation needed to foster an understanding of our changing world adequate to the challenges of the moment.

Evolving an open, networked, and interdisciplinary evolution education research community

Institutions of modern societies have often been argued to evolve, but their evolution is rarely examined in Darwinian and empirical terms. Here we use the categorical data set MaxRange on nations’ regime-types and their constituting institutions historically for analysis of their phylogeny. The MaxRange data set covers all nations in the world system of nations since 1600 with details on accountability structures, executive strength and degree of centralization, constitutional strength, democracy and other aspects of the political systems. We describe and analyze the character of the “true phylogeny” of regime-type evolution in the nations of the world 1600--2020. Our results indicate that evolutionary network rather evolutionary tree models have superior fit to data. Using the extracted phylogeny, we also investigate the dynamic networks of nations in terms of regime-types, accountability structures and their related background factors such as religions and language. Network centrality measures of nations and regime-types provide new important explanatory variables for network-adjusted survival analyses of various institutions, from types and levels of democracy to details of regime-types, including institutions like parliamentarism, presidentialism, and their hybrid forms.

An Evolutionary Political Science: How Modern Nations Evolved Institutionally

Politics today is often characterised as a single dimension which represents a conflict, brought about by modernisation and industrialisation, between the hierarchy and traditionalism of the establishment and people seeking equity and change. Here we review evidence that contemporary politics reflects not one, but two fundamental dilemmas, and that these ‘dual foundations’ of politics are not unique to modern nations, but are inherent to life in all human groups. Human interdependence creates two dilemmas which require people to hold ideas about what is to be done. One dilemma concerns conflict between cooperation and competition. This dilemma leads to differences of opinion regarding the extent of equality and inequality. The other dilemma is about the coordination of collective activities. This dilemma leads to conflicts about the extent of social control. We use anthropological evidence from the Human Relations Area Files, and other literature from anthropology and related disciplines, to extend psychological work showing that these two fundamental dilemmas of group living lead to two dimensions of political conflict and ideology across a large diversity of societies. We end by arguing that quantitative approaches to studying political psychology beyond the experiences of industrialised nations will advance research in both anthropology and psychology. The dual foundations provide the big picture which can tie together the study of human politics across societies and disciplines.

We find the dual foundations of political ideology across the diversity of human social life

In this research I explore the hypothesis that it can be beneficial to the fitness of cultural variants if they channel the energy of the individual who adopts the variant away from biological reproduction and toward the reproduction of the cultural variant. I label this the “inverse correlation hypothesis of cultural maladaptation.” This hypothesis is based on the observation that human biological reproduction is expensive in terms of energy and time. Therefore, cultural traits that minimize reproduction consequently make available resources that an individual could utilize instead to propagate the cultural trait in question. This hypothesis is usually advanced as a plausible explanation of extreme cultural traditions that reduce sexual reproduction to zero, such as celibacy. My first task is to discuss the implications of this hypothesis and to argue that, although it has merits, it has only been given a superficial scientific treatment in the literature, which is unfortunate. The reason for this, I argue, might be due to a vague theoretical distinction between, on the one hand, cultural maladaptive traits that nullify biological fitness and, on the other, selectively neutral or non-adaptive cultural traits that do not affect fitness values. My second task is to articulate an adequate theoretical framework that makes the inverse correlation hypothesis a scientifically respectable explanation of cultural maladaptation. I discuss some theoretical and empirical challenges that this hypothesis faces, but that they are not fatal as they are well-trodden by evolutionary biologists and philosophers.

The inverse correlation hypothesis of cultural maladaptation.

I will highlight a funding scheme that I am running on behalf of the Cultural Evolution Society. The scheme will address issues that will transform the important, yet underfunded, field of cultural evolution. How our cultures evolve (including how information is transmitted, how people make decisions, and the interaction with our biology) is a pressing issue in a world in which our cultural activities are causing rapid, and drastic, social and physical changes. Through 16 research projects, 5 applied working groups, 5 workshops, 1 landmark conference, 3 capacity building training courses, and public engagement activities, the grant aims to tackle early career obstacles, western-centrism, traditional disciplinary divides, and division of scientists and public policy makers. Join me for more information, videos on specifics, and open discussions. In the meantime further details can be found on the cultural evolution society website.

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