Cultural selection theory has been rejected by many social scientists. The objections against this theory are listed and commented. Some of the objections can be dismissed as expressions of preference for one perspective over another. Different perspectives lead scientists to make different kinds of discoveries, but all perspectives are valid, and no theory or perspective can cover all aspects of social phenomena. The limitations of cultural selection theory are discussed and some improvements are proposed. It is concluded that cultural selection theory can explain certain phenomena that other theories cannot explain, especially phenomena that are unplanned or unintended.

In a recent article, Barrett (2008) argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model—and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole—it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose that representational content biases might explain why some concepts become widespread, but that context biases in cultural transmission are necessary to explain why people come to believe in some counterintuitive agents rather than others. Many supernatural agents, including those worshipped by other cultural groups, meet Barret’s criteria. Nevertheless, people do not come to believe in the gods of their neighbors. This raises a new challenge for the cognitive science of religion: the Zeus Problem. Zeus contains all of the features of successful gods, and was once a target for widespread belief, worship, and commitment. But Zeus is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment, despite having the requisite content to fulfill Barret’s criteria. We analyze Santa Claus, God, and Zeus with both content and context biases, finding that context—not content—explains belief. We argue that a successful cognitive science of religious belief needs to move beyond simplistic notions of cultural evolution that only include representational content biases.

The central thesis of

Culturally counterintuitive concepts are ideas that violate a small number of justifiable expectations raised by shared beliefs of a group of people. Previous studies have shown that ideas that violate a small number of expectations are better remembered by people than ideas that conform to their expectations or ideas that violate a large number of people’s expectations. However, as counterintuitive ideas become embedded in a group’s belief-system they lose their memorability advantages and must change to regain those advantages. This article presents two case studies conducted to better understand the dynamics of the diffusion of information. It outlines how a cognition and culture approach can help us understand cultural dynamics and offers new insights into rumor diffusion and new religious movement splits.

Many human interactions involve pieces of information being passed from one person to another, raising the question of how this process of information transmission is affected by the capacities of the agents involved. In the 1930s, Sir Frederic Bartlett explored the influence of memory biases in “serial reproduction” of information, in which one person’s reconstruction of a stimulus from memory becomes the stimulus seen by the next person. These experiments were done using relatively uncontrolled stimuli such as pictures and stories, but suggested that serial reproduction would transform information in a way that reflected the biases inherent in memory. We formally analyze serial reproduction using a Bayesian model of reconstruction from memory, giving a general result characterizing the effect of memory biases on information transmission. We then test the predictions of this account in two experiments using simple one-dimensional stimuli. Our results provide theoretical and empirical justification for the idea that serial reproduction reflects memory biases. 1