Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cultural Variation and Evolution

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Graduate student Adrian V. Bell, along adviser Dr. Peter Richerson, will undertake research to empirically test theoretical models of cultural change. Human beings learn their culture from others. Therefore, to look at cultural microevolution in action, the researchers will test social learning models for their predictive power in a few key learning domains. The research will be carried out in the Islands of Tonga and among the Tongan diaspora in the United States. The contrast between Tonga's marked geographic boundaries and the open and quickly moving Tongan diaspora provides an excellent natural experiment. In each site, a culturally conservative community and a rapidly changing community will be chosen for study. The investigators will focus on how individual-level decisions about who to learn from and what to learn, affect the spread, change, or conservation of behavioral traditions. Data collection will include ego centered networks and structured interviews. The investigator will use statistical procedures to rank evolutionary models of cultural change and highlight those that best explain trait variability revealed in the data. Every society in the world is currently experiencing rapid change. Understanding how cultural change proceeds is fundamental to understanding human beings today. This research will contribute to this endeavor through empirical testing of longstanding, but heretofore untested, models. The research also will contribute to determing how culture change works at the level of the individual, both among those who have migrated to the United States and among those who have not.