Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cultural Variation and Evolution

研究生阿德里安五贝尔，沿着顾问博士彼得Richerson，将进行研究，以实证检验文化变革的理论模型。人类从别人那里学习自己的文化。因此，为了研究文化微进化的作用，研究人员将测试社会学习模型在几个关键学习领域的预测能力。研究将在汤加群岛和在美国的汤加侨民中进行。汤加明显的地理边界与开放和快速流动的汤加侨民形成鲜明对比，这是一个极好的自然实验。在每个地点，将选择一个文化保守的社区和一个迅速变化的社区进行研究。研究人员将专注于个人层面的决定，向谁学习和学习什么，如何影响行为传统的传播，改变或保护。数据收集将包括以自我为中心的网络和结构化访谈。研究人员将使用统计程序对文化变化的进化模型进行排名，并突出那些最能解释数据中揭示的性状变异的模型。世界上的每一个社会都在经历着快速的变化。了解文化变迁是如何进行的，是了解当今人类的基础。这项研究将有助于这一奋进，通过长期的实证检验，但迄今为止未经检验的模型。这项研究还将有助于确定文化变革如何在个人层面上发挥作用，无论是在那些已经移民到美国的人还是在那些没有移民到美国的人中。

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.