A paper appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a strikingly simple answer to a longstanding question: How do people learn and settle on shared social conventions, from everyday habits to workplace norms? Researchers from the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University have found that people do not primarily learn by copying others or by calculating the most likely choice. Instead, they follow a two-stage process—sampling behaviors at first, then committing once enough evidence accumulates.
We think norms spread by imitation, but one deceptively simple rule tells a more human story
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The relationships human societies have with animals aren’t fixed, but vary according to era, culture, territory and customs.This post was originally published on this site
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Americans are more likely to turn to authoritarian leaders when jobs are being lost due to offshoring than they are when job losses result from automation, an international research team has found. This is despite [...]
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Just as major global powers are retreating from climate finance commitments, a new empirical study provides, for the first time, evidence of a direct link between climate finance and a lower risk of resource-related conflict [...]
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Natural resources—such as fossil fuels, water, and minerals—are materials found in the environment that are essential for life and highly utilized in production. Though these resources are viewed as essential to economic development and wealth, [...]
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Millions of Americans trade cryptocurrency, but a new study from the University of Iowa finds many of them may not be very savvy when it comes to finance, acting more like meme stock traders and [...]
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Citizen participation is widely seen as key to a successful energy transition. In practice, however, it often remains more of an ideal than a reality. In her Ph.D. research at TU/e, Nikki Kluskens shows just [...]
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If you were to ask democracy scholars what they consider the greatest threat to American democracy, you might assume it is voters who support undemocratic practices or policies. But the real answer may surprise you: [...]
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An Iranian propaganda video depicts Donald Trump, Netanyahu and Satan as Lego figurines, the White House combines real footage of airstrikes with clips from films and video games, and the American president shares AI-generated videos [...]
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In 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the primary trade framework for the three countries. The agreement is now being reviewed by the three countries. In [...]
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In recent years, many observers have noted parallels between the current international environment and the 1930s, including rising geopolitical tensions, political polarization, trade conflicts, and regional wars. This raised a broader question: How do changes [...]
