Elisa Heinrich Mora, Kaleda K. Denton, Michael E. Palmer, and Marcus W. Feldman

PNAS 122 (3) e2417078122

Conformist and anticonformist biases in acquiring cultural variants have been documented in humans and several nonhuman species. We introduce a framework for quantifying these biases when cultural traits are ordered, with greater and lesser values, and either continuous (e.g., level of a behavior) or discrete (e.g., number of displays of a behavior). Unlike previous models, we do not measure a cultural variant’s popularity by its distance to the population mean, but rather by its distance to other variants. We find that conformity can produce a variety of population distributions that need not center around the initial population’s mean variant. Anticonformity may lead to highly polarized or uniformly distributed populations, depending on its strength and on individuals’ precision when copying others.

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