Denmark

Introduction: The observation that child-directed speech (CDS) benefits language learning has been taken to suggest that this register is part of natural pedagogy – a suite of evolved pro-social communicative behaviours that use ostension to teach culturally relevant knowledge. While prosodic features of CDS appear universal, phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical features tend to vary cross-linguistically. I argue that (a) this variation in CDS reflects different solutions to trade-offs between affective bonding and teaching, based on specific linguistic affordances and cultural constraints, and that (b) the way didactic features are incorporated into CDS is itself acquired and transmitted. &lt;br&gt;Evidence: Preliminary evidence comes from (a) comparisons of acted vs spontaneous CDS, where positive affect expression can render the latter suboptimal for language learning, (b) CDS of proficient L2-speakers which lacks some features of native CDS and (c) iterated language learning experiments in which learners who subsequently teach change transmission. Further evidence should come from tracing changes in teaching efficiency during cultural transmission under social vs asocial learning conditions. &lt;br&gt;Discussion: CDS may be a special case of conventionalisation of didactic features which can themselves be learned thereby reducing the individual cost of prosocial behaviours like teaching.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Learning to Transmit: The Acquired Nature of Child-Directed Speech

child-directed speech

language evolution

teaching

language learning

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Introduction: The observation that child-directed speech (CDS) benefits language learning has been taken to suggest that this register is part of natural pedagogy – a suite of evolved pro-social communicative behaviours that use ostension to teach culturally relevant knowledge. While prosodic features of CDS appear universal, phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical features tend to vary cross-linguistically. I argue that (a) this variation in CDS reflects different solutions to trade-offs between affective bonding and teaching, based on specific linguistic affordances and cultural constraints, and that (b) the way didactic features are incorporated into CDS is itself acquired and transmitted. Evidence: Preliminary evidence comes from (a) comparisons of acted vs spontaneous CDS, where positive affect expression can render the latter suboptimal for language learning, (b) CDS of proficient L2-speakers which lacks some features of native CDS and (c) iterated language learning experiments in which learners who subsequently teach change transmission. Further evidence should come from tracing changes in teaching efficiency during cultural transmission under social vs asocial learning conditions. Discussion: CDS may be a special case of conventionalisation of didactic features which can themselves be learned thereby reducing the individual cost of prosocial behaviours like teaching.

technical paper

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

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#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

 Self-domestication refers to a recent hypothesis about how our species emerged. It claims that the human distinctiveness is, to a large extent, the outcome of an evolutionary process similar to animal domestication. This includes our enhanced social cognition, increased cooperation, and extended social networks, and ultimately, our advanced technology and sophisticated culture. Language is perhaps the most distinctive of human features. In this talk, I will present a model of language evolution under the effects of self-domestication forces. At the basis of this model one can find the idea that self-domestication, through its impact on our behavior, facilitated the creation of the cultural niche that enables the sophistication of language structure and use via a cultural mechanism. Some cognitive changes to which self-domestication might have also aided, like our increased cognitive fluidity, could have also contributed to make human language and human pragmatics more complex. This evolutionary model ties different stages in the evolution of languages with changes in the management of aggression (at the core of the self-domestication hypothesis), with both aspects being engaged in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, as both depend on, and impact on a common neurobiological substrate. The model argues for a strong continuity between human language and the cognitive abilities and behaviors of other species, but it also grants cultural evolution a crucial role in language evolution.

The evolution of language under self-domestication forces: a model

 This presentation examines the transplant of the legal doctrine of assignment of contract in the Japanese legal system as a case of cultural evolution. Its main objective is to examine how the existing legal literature on legal transplants can be re-evaluated in the theoretical framework of cultural evolution. This presentation will be mainly based on qualitative analysis of legal and doctrinal sources of the legal systems involved, and on a general review of the comparative legal scholarship on legal transplants and legal evolution. This presentation rejects an essentialist vision of legal culture, according to which legal evolution occurs only in stages and legal transplants can happen only between legal cultures which share a common tradition. Instead, this presentation shows that legal transplants are possible despite hurdles such as differences in language, culture and geography. It also reveals that legal transplants involving highly technical legal doctrines without political coloration, such as the doctrine of assignment of contract, can occur without any decisive relationship to legal culture. Based on these findings, this presentation strongly suggests that legal transplants should be studied as typical cases of cultural evolution.

Legal Transplants as Cultural Evolution: The Doctrine of Assignment of Contract in Italy and Japan

**Author(s):** Williams, K.; Votruba, A.; Neuberg, S.; Saks, M. Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend towards elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. We discuss these findings in light of individual and cultural factors previously shown to influence capital punishment attitudes.

Resource availability shapes endorsement of the death penalty

 Conflict is a persistent feature of primate societies. Although sociability has valuable benefits, such as protection against predators or access to resources, maintaining peaceful relationships with other group members can be costly for individuals. Conflict episodes within a social group promote physical contact and changes in social dynamics. All social animals engage in episodes of conflict and aggression for dominance, control of resources, food, sexual partners, or territories. To restore social balance, primates display appeasement gestures that may repair relationships after fights. One way to restore harmony after is through sexual behavior. Non-conceptive sexual behaviors have been described in most primate species. These are explained by its communicative or sociosexual functions, which include tension regulation, dominance signaling, ties strengthening, and reconciliation among others. In this study, we systematically reviewed literature on primate conflict and resolution to determine how frequently sexual behavior has appeasing function. Results showed that closely related species like bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) routinely use sexual behavior for conflict resolution. However, it is still necessary to investigate reconciliatory sexual behavior in other primate species.

Make love, not war: Conflict and sexual reconciliation in primates

 Irons (2001) and Sosis (2003) proposed that some actions are “hard” or “costly” to fake signals of altruism. If it is harder for non-altruists to perform an action than for altruists, associating with other signalers can solve cooperation dilemmas. This invites intuitive reference to costly signaling theory from animal behavior, but this theory describes signals of quality, not intent. Further, costly and hard are open to interpretation. It may take extra effort to perform the signal dishonestly. Deception may be unlikely to be innovated. Socially learning of deception may be inhibited as deceivers present as honest. Signal receivers may invest in false-signal detection. These all present distinct dynamics. Multiple interpretations of the verbal model of costly/hard to fake signals are mathematically formalized and implemented in social learning models. Analytic solutions for evolutionary equilibrium are derived for each. Under a range of conditions for some but not all interpretations, such signals and altruism spread through a population. Where deception entails some cost or is less likely to be learned hard to fake-signals can lead to group success through altruistic cooperation. A particularly interesting case is where deceptive parasitic free-riders paradoxically benefit the group by amplifying recruitment via effective false advertising: “Useful Liars”.

Credibility and Deception: modeling deceptive signals of intention to cooperate

 I study the impact of exposure to large adverse shocks on people's normative beliefs. Combining data on the occurrences of conflicts, epidemics, and other natural disasters with large-scale survey data covering hundreds of normative beliefs, I make four findings. First, individuals surveyed in the weeks after a shock hits in their vicinity shift their normative beliefs closer to the local modal beliefs, place more importance on norm adherence, and exhibit a greater willingness to sanction norm deviations. Second, the effect is found for normative beliefs across many domains, pointing to a psychological mechanism rather than a strategic response to shocks. Third, shocks can lead to belief polarization if the local modal beliefs differ across groups before a shock hits. Fourth, examining within-country variation in shocks experienced during early lifetime across cohorts, I find that the effect persists.

Aftershocks: How Wars, Epidemics, and Other Natural Disasters Tighten Social Norms

**Author(s):** Ehret, S; Constantino, S; Vogt, S; Weber, E; Efferson, C Introduction: Social tipping can accelerate behavior change in domains from social justice to climate change. When people vary, however, heterogeneity can undermine tipping in unexpected ways. Methods: We ran two experiments. For both, participants faced incentives to coordinate. After they had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm by incentivizing some participants to change behavior. The first experiment examined polarized identities around the 2020 U.S. elections by using either neutral labels for choices or partisan political images. The second experiment varied both the size of the intervention and the specific individuals targeted by the intervention. Results: The payoff-irrelevant relabeling in the first experiment generated extreme differences. Neutral groups evolved norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. Political groups evolved norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. The second experiment showed that the social gains of behavior change depend on strong interactions between the size and target of the intervention.

Activating cultural change for good (?) in heterogeneous populations

**Author(s):** Adamson, J.; Wilson, E.O. In this paper we explore how hominin behavior responds to the distribution of resources in territorial conflict. We develop an economic model to organize the findings of primatologists, isolating how resource skew and variance affect territorial ranges, as well as how they interact with unequal appropriation abilities. Testing the predictions for humans in a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that observed behavior clusters around the equilibrium predictions and all comparative statics have the predicted sign. We also find that equally strong appropriators choose more exclusive and less overlapping ranges than predicted with symmetric resources, and weaker appropriators choose more engulfed ranges than predicted with skewed resources. (Unpublished Working Paper available online at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4053185)

The Geography of Resources, Conflict, and Territory in Hominins

**Author(s):** White, C. J. M.; Muthukrishna, M. We tested whether sharing socioeconomic status predicts cultural similarity between residents of different nations, such as whether elites share in a “global culture” or whether certain cultural variants are characteristic of low SES. We used the cultural fixation index to examine cultural distance between members of socioeconomic groups living in 88 countries, according to the set of cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors assessed by the World Values Survey (2005 – 2019). Overall, within-country cultural distances between SES-groups (defined by education, income, or self-reported status) were small, and between-country cultural distances were no more similar if people shared the same SES. However, highly educated respondents were consistently more culturally similar to people in the USA. This pattern was not found when SES was defined by income or self-reported status, and education did not predict cultural similarities to other global superpowers (e.g., China or Russia). Results show the global spread of Western values through formal education and imply that cross-cultural studies recruiting college-educated samples are likely to under-represent the world’s cultural variation.

Higher education predicts worldwide cultural similarity to the United States

**Author(s):** Kelly, Daniel; Brownstein, Michael Consistency is an abstract but important social value. We first distinguish logical consistency, the kind of relationship that can hold between sentences or propositions, from that what we’ll call ethical consistency a kind of ideal that people can aspire to in themselves and their social interactions. We’ll then examine the roots of people’s concern for ethical consistency. We distinguish two families of accounts of this concern. The first holds that consistency is a precondition for the realization of different forms of cognitive and moral sophistication. On this “universalist view,” a drive toward consistency is inherent in the nature of cognition, action, and morality. Agents who aspire to be autonomous, self-governing individuals will inevitably endeavor to maintain consistency across actions in different settings, and between their present intentions and future actions. This version of the ideal of consistent even lies near the heart of Kantian moral theory, and exerts influence on contemporary extensions of it. A second view holds that ethical concern for consistency is a culturally evolved value associated with Western individualism, the most extreme versions of which are parochial to WEIRD cultures. This “localist view” sees variability across time and culture in concern for consistency-related virtues like integrity, authenticity, sincerity, etc. as evidence that not all forms of consistency are inscribed in the innate machinery of the human mind, let alone mentality in general. Rather, cultures have evolved different norms to govern individual actions and social interactions, some of which put a premium on values like authenticity, while others prize situational fluidity and the ability to calibrate behavior to different social contexts. After articulating and providing examples of these two views, we evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. We conclude with an argument in favor of the localist view, based on the idea that even in WEIRD cultures that prize it, achieving ethical consistency is a constant struggle rather an automatic result of having a mind, and social pressure and collectively enforced norms are required to maintain it. We end with some reflections on these issues made from a normative ethical perspective rather than an empirical one, situating our discussion with respect to recent normative debates about the value of code-switching and a program of moral education that teaches social fluidity and cultural fit.

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The evolution of language under self-domestication forces: a model

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