{"pk":24644,"title":"Quantifying Culture: an Information-Theoretic Measure of how Memes Flow Through Minds","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cultural evolution is changing humanity much faster than genetic evolution, but at present we lack a way to empirically ground models of cultural evolution in a quantitative, content-agnostic way analogous to counting alleles in models of genetic evolution. A way to measure what information ends up in which minds would permit quantitative models of the many different processes that govern the flow of memes through minds. We offer a method for estimating the amount of information retained based on previous exposure to a cultural artifact. Entropy estimates that are generated based on a test set from e.g. Harry Potter will differ between a treatment group (Readers, people who have read Harry Potter), and a control group (Non-Readers). This difference is an expression, in bits, of how much information from the book stored in Readers' minds and therefore capable of influencing behavior.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Anthropology; Linguistics; Psychology; Behavioral Science; Culture; Evolution; Language and thought; Memory; Computer-based experiment"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20r0h350","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Matthew","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cashman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Damian","middle_name":"E","last_name":"Blasi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24644/galley/21485/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24644/galley/14241/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24644/galley/18028/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24644/galley/21485/download/"}]}