Cultural attraction

Helena Miton

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, USA

[email protected]

Chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution

Abstract
Cultural attraction theory, sometimes referred to as the ‘Paris school’ in cultural
evolution, has gained traction in cultural evolution over the past couple of decades. I first
present cultural attraction by suggesting that it focuses on one mechanism –
transformation— as being at the core of cultural evolution. Then, I introduce cultural
attraction theory as a framework in cultural evolution, including how it builds on a few key
concepts (cultural causal chains, cultural attractors, factors of attraction), and how this
framework has been used in cultural evolution to relate cultural phenomena (attractors) to
their causes (factors of attraction) in several empirical case studies. Finally, I discuss a few
implications of this approach for cultural evolution.

Keywords: cultural attraction, cultural attraction theory, biased transformation

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 Introduction: explaining culture

Let us start with two observations of cultural phenomena. First, between 1900 and 1980,
Teddy bears’ faces evolved. The ratio of the vertical distance between their eyes and their
crown to the distance between their eyes and the base of their head increased, and the
ratio of the distance between the tip of their snout and the back of their head to the
distance between the top of their head and its base decreased (Gould, 1979; Hinde &
Barden, 1985). Second, Baku dream-eater demons, from the Chinese and Japanese
folklore, are chimeras made of leftover pieces after gods created all the other animals.
They almost always include, at least, elephant and tiger body parts, and are said to devour
nightmares. They have been part of the Japanese folklore since at least the 15 th century
(Hori, 2005). A modern-day variant of this mythological creature can be found in the
Pokemon Drowzee, which is, in line with its dream-eater ancestry, associated to hypnotic
capacities.

Both teddy bears and Baku dream-eaters are cultural types. The occurrences (tokens) of
these two types are relatively spread in time and space, while retaining enough of their
defining characteristics. Whatever the context in which they are encountered, teddy bears
are stuffed toys representing bears and Bakus are chimeras with supernatural, dream-
eating, capabilities. This brings us to two main aspects of culture: social transmission (or
propagation) and stability. To be cultural, an item must (a) propagate in a population
through many episodes of transmission, and (b) be stable—that is, keeps its characteristic
features—at a populational level.

We can have a look at what explains these examples. Teddy bears’ traits became more
neotenic, i.e., more similar to traits of infants and toddlers than to traits of adults (Gould,
1979; Hinde & Barden, 1985). Acquiring and preserving this feature made Teddy bears
look particularly cute and secured their cultural success. Baku dream-eaters, on their end,
have traits that make them easy to remember: they are monsters combining body parts
from different animals (Sperber, 1996b). Bakus also have supernatural abilities: they can
devour dreams and nightmares. Such supernatural abilities—i.e., eating something
immaterial—are counterintuitive, which makes them easier to remember (Boyer, 2007;

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Harmon-Vukić, Upal, & Sheehan, 2012; Johnson, Bishop, & Kelly, 2010; Norenzayan,
Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006).

When facing such recurring forms over time and space, they can be explained in two
main different ways. A first possibility would be to assume that tokens resemble each
other mostly because a new token is created by being relatively faithfully passed on, in a
rather close analogy to genetic transmission. Specific variants then end up more frequent
than others because humans select which variant they transmit or learn. The second
possibility is that the distribution we observe results, not from being faithfully passed
through generations, but from being transformed in non-random ways whenever it is
passed on. In other words, these forms end up recurring because, for various reasons,
they are likely to be transformed in similar ways whenever they are transmitted. It would
mean than, even if or when individual episodes (or events) of transmission leads to an
imperfect copy, on average and through multiple episodes of transmission, the cultural
tokens get transformed towards specific forms over time. And that is the possibility
pursued by cultural attraction theory.

Cultural attraction theory encompasses both a vision of cultural phenomena

emerging from transformations, and a more global framework. Since its very beginning
(i.e., Sperber, 1985), cultural attraction has been driven by an anthropological and
ethnographic observation: cultural contents are transmitted with little fidelity (i.e.,
transmission does not create perfect or even very similar copies), and usually as part of
everyday life and interactions. From this starting point, cultural attraction has
championed and tested the idea that non-random transformations can sustain cultural
phenomena, and established itself as a general framework in cultural evolution.

Transformations as a key mechanism in cultural evolution

To understand cultural phenomena, cultural evolution has relied on an analogy with

biological evolution. Most frameworks, e.g., memetics (Aunger, 2000; Blackmore &
Blackmore, 2000; Dawkins, 1993; Dawkins & Davis, 2017) and selectionist accounts
(Boyd & Richerson, 1988, 2005; Durham, 1991; Feldman & Laland, 1996; Richerson &
Boyd, 2008) have focused on the relative fidelity of different mechanisms, with the

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assumptions that they are preservative to greater or smaller extent (Charbonneau, 2018).
In other words, different mechanisms would produce more or less exact copies as they
are used to transmit information. Such frameworks postulate that cultural evolution
operates through relatively faithful transmission (to the extreme of replication in the case
of memetics) and selection. This postulate is frequently accompanied by the assumption
that the much greater richness and persistence of human cultures compared to that of
other animals’ cultures is an effect of human’s much greater imitative abilities
(Tomasello, 2016; Tomasello et al., 1993; Whiten et al., 2009). By contrast, cultural
attraction suggests a different mechanism (compared to high-fidelity transmission plus
selection) capable in principle of securing cultural evolution: biased transformations of
the contents transmitted at every step. Cultural attraction states that transformations, if
they happen in non-random directions and especially when they converge (i.e., stabilize
at a fixed point), play a key role in cultural evolution. Relatedly, cultural attraction has
insisted that a variety of mechanisms (including cognitive) played a causal role in these
convergent transformations, in contrast to the view that the most relevant psychological
mechanisms involved in cultural evolution were biases in the selection of cultural variants
to be copied (e.g., prestige-biased or conformity-biased transmission).

The idea of cultural attraction was based on the observation that the actual mechanisms
involved in cultural transmission are much more varied and often much less faithful than
is commonly assumed in the study cultural evolution. This suggested that the black box
of mechanisms and processes involved in cultural transmission had to be opened and
explored systematically. By contrast with black box approaches, cultural attraction was
inspired by the recognition that most processes involved in cultural transmission 1) need
not have evolved for the transmission of cultural information, and 2) tend to transform
the contents they transmit, rather than strictly preserve them.

Supporting the idea of cultural attraction -i.e., that non-random transformations sustain
and determine cultural phenomena- requires evidence of two specific kinds. First, it
requires evidence that transformations (at the micro-scale) can lead to stability (at the
populational, cultural, macroscopic) scale. Second, we also need evidence that the
mechanisms recruited by cultural transmission in humans effectively lead to non-random
transformations.

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Cultural stability can emerge from transformations

Cultural attraction states that cultural phenomena – i.e. recurrent practices, ideas, and
artifacts – can result from transformations. The prediction for artificial and natural
population is that cultural stability can be obtained even when the only type of operation
to occur at the individual level is transformations. The theory does not deny that faithful
copying and other forms of information preservation in individual episodes of
information transmission occur and play an important role. What it claims is only that
preservative processes are not strictly necessary and that, in practice, they combine with
constructive processes that aim at exploiting the information provided by models,
teachers, and others generally. Such exploitation typically involves some degree of non-
random transformation of the input. This prediction has been made explicit, tested, and
supported by models and experiments.

Ongoing modelling work has suggested that non-random probabilistic transformations

(especially convergent, or biased) even at every step in transmission can yield stability and
explain the specific distributions observed at cultural (populational) scales. Such
approaches include agent-based models (Acerbi et al., 2021; Mesoudi, 2021b) and more
analytical methods, using transition (or evolutionary) matrices (e.g., Claidière, Scott-
Phillips, et al., 2014). These models implemented cultural attraction as transformations:
convergent, i.e., stochastic and biased towards a specific value at the level of transmission
episodes (Acerbi et al., 2021), biased, understood as substantial and directional mutation
at the individual level (Mesoudi, 2021b), or via specific transition probabilities between
one generation and the next in a population (Claidière, Scott-Phillips, et al., 2014). The
underlying intuition is that individual tokens are more likely to move towards a specific
point or direction – and that impacts population-level outcomes. The results of these
models supported the idea that probabilistic, transformations can lead to stable cultural
phenomena.

Experiments – typically using transmission chains paradigms (Mesoudi, 2021a) have also
shown similar patterns, in which the cumulative changes (transformations) made to the
transmitted content over generations of learners converge to a stable form, for instance,
when asked to learn and reproduce a mathematical function capturing the relationship
between the size of two stimuli. The mathematical function could start off as either
positive linear (x = y), negative linear (x = -y), non-linear, or random. Yet, after nine
generations, most participants produced data that followed the simple, positive, linear (x

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= y) function, no matter the initial conditions, i.e., which mathematical function they
started with (Kalish et al., 2007). These effects can also be obtained in non-human
primates. In an experiment in which baboons have to reproduce patterns of four squares
by touching them on a grid, their transformations of the models presented converge on
producing continuous shapes (Claidière et al., 2018; Claidière, Smith, et al., 2014).

Mechanisms involved in cultural transmission produce transformations

Diverse mechanisms can cause the type of non-random transformations that cultural
attraction suggests are able to sustain cultural phenomena. Such mechanisms span
various domains, including cognition, communication and interaction, and interactions
with diverse constraints from the environment.

Cognitive mechanisms constitute a first source of probabilistic transformations. Cultural

phenomena are sustained through cognitive mechanisms at different time points during
their lifetimes: when told and encoding or when retrieving a story from memory and
retelling it for instance. Since their very beginnings, transmission chain experiments have
shown patterns of distortions caused by memory, both for narratives and drawings (e.g.,
(Bartlett, 1932; Tamariz & Kirby, 2015). Priors and inductive biases are another related
set of mechanisms involved in cultural transmission which result in tendencies to
transform information in directed ways, with cumulative effects in iterated learning
experiments (Canini et al., 2014; Kalish et al., 2007). Regularization, which occurs when
the output produced by a learner is less variable than the data they observed is another
mechanism which creates transformations with population-level consequences
(Ferdinand, 2015; Kempe et al., 2015). The logic behind how cognitive mechanisms
create systematic transformations at the level of the population is that cognitive
processes alter the information they store and process at the individual (micro) level; in
turn, these changes at individual levels accumulate and end up having an influence on
what is observable at the level of the population.

Communication and interactions are also a major source of transformations and are
heavily recruited in cultural transmission. One recent model (Falandays & Smaldino, n.d.)
used unsupervised category learning, a machine learning technique in which categories
are not pre-given but rather must be created by the learner or algorithm, to show the
emergence of stable cultural phenomena from simulated agents who interact with each

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other. In other words, over time and interactions, the categories used by agents
increasingly align across agents, and then remain stable.

Communication game experiments -experiments in which a pair or a group of

participants must associate signals and meanings to communicate with each other- have
shown how specific features of languages -e.g., compositionality- can emerge from
transformations. In experiments, these features emerge from transformations during
iterated learning (the game is played by different participants, who are learning and using
the signals-meaning mappings on their own) or repeated interactions (same participants
playing several rounds together). In particular, languages (understood here as mappings
of signals to meanings) become increasingly structured and easy to learn as interactions
unravelled during the experiments (S. Kirby et al., 2008; Verhoef et al., 2014). Typically,
participants start the experiment with a set of random signals associated to a set of
structured meanings (for instance, pictures that vary along specific dimensions and/or
have defined categories). By the end of the experiment, participants frequently use a
more structured set of signals, which mirrors the regularities present in the set of
meanings. For instance, in Kirby et al 2008, in some of the experimentally evolved
'languages', each of three patterns in which shapes could move were referred to using
their own label.

Environmental or ecological factors able to create such mechanisms have been less
directly studied. One transmission chain experiment (Miton, Wolf, et al., 2020) used a
rhythm reproduction task and showed that different physical constraints can create
directed and predictable transformations with effects at the level of the experimental
population. More anecdotal evidence for the role of the environment in creating directed
transformations has been provided by the history and evolution of techniques and
technology, for instance whenever a technology is adapted to local contexts and its used
altered with such novel circumstances (Basalla, 1988).

Framework: a pluralistic approach to culture

Cultural attraction theory has been referred to, historically, as “epidemiology of ideas”,
“epidemiology of representations”, “cultural epidemiology” (Atran et al., 2002; Boyer,
2007) or more recently, “Paris school” ( by opposition to the “California school” which

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includes researchers from the gene-culture coevolution paradigm, see Heyes, 2018 and
Sterelny, 2017). This analogy to epidemiology highlights that cultural attraction theory
was meant as a pluralistic and general framework for the naturalistic study of culture.
Under this framework, the research questions usually take the form of asking “why is a
given practice X culturally successful?”, and the answer to this question will depend on
the cultural practice studied. In other words, each successful tradition will be stable and
successful for its own set of (often diverse) causes.
As a general framework, cultural attraction theory (as presented in Claidière, Scott-Phillips,
et al., 2014; Heintz, 2018; Scott‐Phillips et al., 2018; Sperber, 1996) recruits three
operational concepts: cultural causal chains, cultural attractors, and factors of attraction.

Cultural causal chains

Cultural causal chains are defined as « chains of causally related events in which (a)
mental representations (beliefs, knowledge, intentions, etc.) cause public productions
(speech, artefacts, behaviour, etc.), which in turn cause further mental representations in
other individuals, and so forth and (b) some items in the chain exhibit a degree of
similarity and thus constitute relatively stable distributions of similar items in the
population and its habitat, and across time and space» (Scott‐Phillips et al., 2018).
Cultural causal chains provide a schematic description of the different steps or events
involved in cultural transmission. Such causal chains show an alternation of mental and
behavioural episodes. Mental processes in a source lead to an observable behaviour (or
products of behaviour) leading to mental processes in a recipient, and so on. The
behavioural components in such a chain can be directly observed and provide evidence
of the mental processes in the source and in the recipient. These chains are a useful tool
in investigating cultural stability and evolution – see Guillo & Claidière, 2020; Sperber &
Hirschfeld, n.d for examples). By charting out each step in the social transmission of
cultural contents and asking which systems or means of transmission these steps recruit,
cultural causal chains provide potential causal factors.

Another way in which cultural causal chains have been used is in Olivier Morin’s How
traditions live and die (2016), under the name of diffusion chains. Diffusion chains are
formed by the collection of transmission events through which tokens of a given cultural
type reoccur. Morin suggests that the diffusion chains which support traditions can take

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different shapes, which reflects different ways to overcome the overall lossy and noisy
transmission by increasing the number of transmission episodes. In more details,
repetition involves the same information being repeatedly transmitted, from the same
source, over time; redundancy occurs when the same information is transmitted to the
same recipient by different sources; and finally, proliferation is an almost reverse image
of redundancy: it occurs when one individual transmits the same information to more
than one recipient. The overall approach sketched by Morin also implies that cultural
phenomena can also be stable because of the shape of their diffusion chains and their
number of transmission episodes.

Figure 1. Example of cultural causal chains, adapted from (Sperber & Hirschfeld,
2006) and applied to the two conditions from Tamariz & Kirby 2015’s
transmission chain experiment. The top chain shows the “Copy” condition of the
experiment, in which the scribbles are copied by participants directly – i.e., participants
reproduce the scribble with the model while being able to look at it. It results in
productions fairly similar to the seed scribble, even after the first 4 generations of
participants. By contrast, the bottom chain shows the “Memory” condition, in which
participants try to reproduce the scribble from memory. In this condition, participants
tend to simplify the scribbles.

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Cultural attractors

Cultural attraction theory highlights the fact that transformations (which can occur
during episodes of transmission) can be a factor of stability, provided that they are non-
random. More specifically, in the case of convergent transformations towards some point
in the space of possibilities, cultural items will tend to cluster and stabilize around this
point of convergence, which is then called an attractor. Cultural attractors result from
cultural attraction widely understood – i.e., from non-random transformations.

Existing definitions of attractors have shown considerable variation, and often covered
different levels of abstraction (see Buskell, 2017 for a critical take). Attractors can be
observed at the macro-level of the distribution of cultural items in a population over
time. Observation of cultural phenomena at a populational scale reveal clusters of
variants closely distributed around an attractor point. In this perspective, the distribution
of cultural items in a population reveals the location of attractors, and attractors have a
descriptive, rather than explanatory role and effect. Historical evidence may reveal
change in the location and density of such clusters and hence of the movement and
relative force of attractors over time. For instance, both direction of gaze and spatial
composition in human portraits have shown such dynamics: direct gaze becomes more
frequent during and after the Renaissance (Morin, 2013) and the distribution of free
space around sitters becomes more variable and often more extreme from the 15th
century on (Miton, Sperber, et al., 2020).

Attractors can be tentatively identified by looking at distributions of variants and

assuming that successful variants cluster around attractors. Cultural attractors are a form
of fixation point or area, in the variation space, around which more tokens cluster: it is a
part of the variation space with higher density, relative to the rest of the variation space.
If considering one of our earlier examples, one possible variation space for teddy bears
(Hinde & Barden, 1985), could be two dimensional, with one axis representing the
relative size of the teddy bear’s forehead and the other axis representing the length of its
snout. In such a space, the observed tokens of teddy bears are not randomly spread in
this variation (or design) space: plush toys with no snout and a huge forehead would
hardly look bear-like, and this part of the space would remain empty, with no token
(actual existing teddy bear) there. The attractor for teddy bears here can then be

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understood as the area of the variation space in which plush toys have ratios that
resemble bears and look cute enough, and the associated empirical distribution would
show that the corresponding tokens cluster within this area.

More often than not, if we are able to observe a cultural phenomenon, this implies that
the phenomenon has already reached some critical level of success: most unlucky
(unsuccessful) variants don’t stay around long enough or spread enough to be observed.
In human social lives and interactions, most socially transmitted informational contents
never reach a properly cultural level of spread and stability. Becoming cultural is
relatively rare, and is often due to a combination of factors, rather than to one factor on
its own. The cultural success of anti-vaccination beliefs exemplify this point: their
cultural success is the result of a combination of causal factors, from the universal
psychological reluctance to getting a dangerous substance inside one’s own body to
historically situated social factors such as the lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies
(Miton & Mercier, 2015).

Factors of attraction

While attractors have a purely descriptive role in this framework, “factors of attraction”
are what explains them: processes and mechanisms that play a causal role, that is, “causal
factors that determine which types of transformations are more likely to occur pertain to
the processes that construct the items and to properties of those processes” (Heintz,
2018, p. 1)

Factors of attraction can be categorized based on their reach, i.e., at which scale do they
apply, or on their (loosely defined) type. For reach, the influence on cultural phenomena
can either be local –restricted to a given time and space– or global -related to features
that are present species-wide or in all environments inhabited by humans (Morin, 2016a;
Scott-Phillips et al., 2021). As for type, factors of attraction can be located “inside the
mind” (i.e. cognitive or psychological) or “outside” of it (usually referred to as
‘ecological’) (Scott‐Phillips et al., 2018; Sperber, 1996). Ecological factors of attraction
include diverse factors such as climate, availability of raw materials, and physical or
bodily constraints.

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Explaining culture involves elucidating which factors of attraction are involved in cultural
attractors’ success, including their emergence, their stabilization, and their decline. It also
includes understanding how these factors interact. Factors of attraction usually provide at
least partial answers to two questions at the same time: (1) why is there a cluster of
practices around a given point in the variation space? And (2) what specific
characteristics makes this point in the variation space an attractor? These two questions
are here considered as not independent from one another: the characteristics of cultural
attractors are assumed to be informative as to why cultural practices cluster in their
vicinity. Finally, as will become clearer in the next parts of this chapter, cultural attraction
theory can be used as a flexible framework for case studies in cultural evolution, by
articulating the interplay between causal factors (factors of attraction) and their
consequences on distributions that can be empirically observed.

Case studies: applying cultural attraction theory

Empirical research using cultural attraction theory has covered diverse domains. Here, I
highlight, through a couple of key examples, the interplay between attractors and factors
of attraction as the unifying and underlying principle of these case studies.

Factors of attraction as hypotheses in empirical case studies

At equilibrium, cultural attractors can be described as specific points around which

variants cluster, i.e., they can be identified by considering the distribution of variants.
Out of equilibrium, attractors can additionally be diagnosed either by changes in
frequency in clusters (they are points around which frequency of variants increase) or by
the type of transformations that bring about this increase in frequency (i.e., they are
directed rather than random transformations). Hypothesis-testing, from a cultural
attraction theory standpoint, thus requires to first identify potential factors of attraction –
i.e., a set of possible causes– and to predict their consequences at a population-level.
There are two main logics that empirical research can follow: either from factors of
attraction to attractors, or from attractors to factors of attraction.

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From hypothesized factors of attraction to observing attractors

First, whenever potential factors of attraction are already known, it is possible to use
them to derive predictions on attractors. One way of determining which factors of
attraction might influence one cultural type is to reconstitute the causal chain that brings
them about. This means charting out the main characteristics of the cultural type, i.e., the
characteristics shared by the tokens (individual occurrences) that would be considered
part of the cultural type. In which modality is this type expressed - i.e., by which sensory
system does it have to be processed or produced? Whether a content is perceived and
processed by the human visual or auditory perceptual systems means that this content is
not submitted to the same pressures. Visual contents are exposed, for instance, to
pressures related to colour perception (Hadjikhani et al., 1998) or complexity (Miton &
Morin, 2019; 2021). Contents mediated by the auditory system have to face, among
others, pressures related to pitch (Bendor & Wang, 2006; McDermott & Oxenham,
2008) and fine temporal structures (Moore & Sęk, 2009). Cognitive science has also now
accumulated a large amount of results regarding how perceptual systems process
information (including differential sensitivity to different stimuli). Similarly, having to be
stored or produced through different systems also exposes different contents to different
pressures.

Once a potential factor of attraction is identified, it becomes possible to predict how this
causal factor might cause a cultural item’s shape and success, or at least which precise
kinds or features of a given cultural item would be favoured.

The ‘recipe’ here is as follows: First, (1) identify a potential causal factor. Ideally, it
should be reliable and well-understood. (2) Determine which types of cultural items this
causal factor would have an effect on, (3), Use what is known of the effect to predict the
spatial and temporal distribution of relevant cultural items (i.e., the prevalence of certain
types over others). Finally, (4) test those predictions -i.e., is it what we observe in the
cultural record?

An example of this can be found in the study of orientation of strokes in writing systems
(Morin, 2018). Because writing exploits the human visual system (Dehaene, 2010;
Dehaene & Cohen, 2007), it should reflect the human visual system’s sensitivity – for
instance, to particular orientations, in this case, cardinals (vertical and horizontal). This is

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a hypothesized factor of attraction. It predicts that cardinal orientations should be over-
represented (i.e., more than could be expected by chance). This prediction is in turn
tested - and confirmed - on a large dataset of 116 scripts: a large majority of those scripts
over-represent cardinal orientations (Morin, 2018). Here, the attractor is for strokes used
in writing systems to follow cardinal orientations; it is explained by our visual system’s
sensitivity for such orientations (e.g., this is the factor of attraction). The same approach
has been used in other studies (Miton & Morin, 2019, 2021, Miton et al. 2020).

This approach can be used equally well on experimental data. As mentioned earlier,
transmission chain experiments are a useful tool to test for cultural attraction. Contrary
to data collected on cultural phenomena as they occur in real life, experimental methods
offer the possibility to create alternative conditions and manipulate factors of attraction
directly. A first way to use experiments to test for the role of a factor of attraction is by
creating a close variant to the attractor: something close to but not exactly at the
suspected attractor. As cultural attraction assumes that episodes of transmission tend, on
average, to produce an outcome closer to the attractor (Morin, 2016b), a ‘lab-grown’
variant designed by a researcher. Such variants can be designed by varying only on one of
the dimensions of interest. Their use can reveal a factor of attraction - see Miton et al.,
2015 for an example of this approach, and below for details.

For instance, in an experimental study using transmission chains with a drumming task,
the hypothesized factor of attraction was physical constraints (Miton, Wolf, et al., 2020).
It was operationalized in the experimental setting as different conditions having different
motor constraints: the movements participants had to make to reproduce the rhythmical
sequence they heard varied in amplitude (short or long distance to cover) and order (for
conditions alternating short and long movements), depending on the condition
participants were in. After a few generations, the rhythms produced by the participants
reflected such physical constraints. The evolved rhythms converged towards variants that
were easier to produce given physical constraints: the rhythms evolved by participants
who had to use movements of two different amplitudes were less metronome-like than
the rhythms evolved by participants who used only movements of the same amplitude.

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In cases in which there is no readily available (i.e., documented and evidenced) known
factor of attraction, it is possible to start from the other end, i.e, from the attractors,
rather than from factors of attraction.

From attractors to factors of attraction: inferring factors of attraction

The other possibility is to reverse-engineer possible factors of attraction. It is a more

agnostic approach than the previous one, to the extent that it does not require a priori
knowledge of factors of attraction.

In understanding one specific cultural practice, one must determine the extent of the
variation in the forms it can take, and whether there are any associated traits that tend to
be particularly recurrent. (Relatively) well-spread and stable variants are indicative of the
presence of attractors. Here, the first step is to get information on attractors, i.e., the
distribution of variants in the population. This task can be best tackled by harnessing
social scientific, including historical and anthropological, sources. The social and human
sciences abound with data that can be used for testing hypotheses in cultural evolution:,
folklorists’ folk tales indices (e.g, Aarne, 1928; used in Tehrani, 2013), databases of
ethnographic excerpts like the HRAF – Human Relations Area Files (used for example in
Hruschka, 2010; Miton et al., 2015; Murray et al., 2017; White et al., 2017) and now D-
Place (K. R. Kirby et al., 2016), and other historical and archaeological datasets (Bentley
et al., 2004; Crema et al., 2016; Jordan & Shennan, 2003; Shennan & Wilkinson, 2001).

This approach, from attractors to factors of attraction, is somehow more ‘data-driven’

than the previous one. Here, large-scale data is first examined to extract regular patterns
out of it, then one uses those patterns to get insights into what might drive the
success/stability, i.e., into suspected factors of attraction. Those hypothetical factors of
attractions are then tested independently. In a few words, this approach can be
summarized as reverse-engineering which factors might support a given cultural item’s
stability.

The way to proceed here goes as follow: First, (1) pick a cultural type with relatively clear
principles of inclusion (i.e., there exist a relatively unambiguous definition or ways to
know whether a token is of the type that is studied or not), Then, (2) collect data and

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define an array of parameters that might be of relevance - i.e., dimensions that might
show patterns of variation. (3) Evaluate how many variants are theoretically possible; it
involves establishing a way to recode the relevant parameters, recoding those relevant
parameters, and checking them for regularities. (4) From these regularities, reverse-
engineer what could have caused them, i.e. form hypotheses about which peculiarities are
actually necessary to stability. (5) Test whether those regularities play a role in sustaining
the cultural items’ stability/success (in a similar way as sketched in the previous part, but
on a dataset that is independent from the one used to identify attractors) - in the same
way as detailed in the previous part.

One case study, bearing on bloodletting (Miton et al., 2015), illustrates those
different steps: (1) The cultural type to study was bloodletting, defined as the medical
practice of bleeding as a medical cure, (2) the eHRAF (Human Relations Area Files) was
searched for the terms bloodletting, bleeding, phlebotomy, venesection and cupping. We
then filtered the results to keep only the explicitly medical uses of the practice. (3) The
ethnographic excerpts were recoded on criteria including, in that case, tool used/
manner, practitioner, prescriptions, location on the body, which allows to (4) observe
regularities on these data: Co-localisation (bleeding is done on the same location on the
body that is affected), lack of systematic prescriptions, recurrent ‘bad blood’ explanation.
(5) Transmission chain experiment with less attractive versions of the story (i.e., versions
for which one of the suspected factors of attraction is modified, ‘de-activated’), e.g., non-
colocalised or accidental bloodletting, were used to test for the effect of those factors of
attraction. Less attractive versions of the story changed, through successive episodes of
recall and retelling, into more attractive variants: non-colocalized variants either lost
details related to the localization of the cut on the body or became co-localized (the
location of the ailment or of the cut was transformed to match each other).

Cultural phenomena Factor of attraction Reference

(attractor)
Widespread cultural Evolved disposition to evaluate Bloch & Sperber,
practices in which the genetic relatedness, 2002
sister’s son can Patrilineality
occasionally capture
resources

16
 *Written characters’ Visual system’s sensitivity to cardinal Morin, 2018
preferential use of cardinal orientations
orientations
*Direct gaze in portraits Direct gaze Morin, 2013
*Spatial composition in Gaze following, action anticipation Miton et al., 2020
profile-oriented portraits
(more free space in front
of sitters than behind
them)
Opposition to GMO Essentialism, Teleological and Blancke et al.,
(Genetically Modified intentional thinking, Disgust 2015
Organisms)
*Bloodletting Causal cognition, disgust, naïve Miton et al., 2015
vitalism
Lack of appeal of pro- Omission bias; disgust/contagion Miton & Mercier,
vaccination beliefs and thinking; defiance towards specific 2015
relative appeal of anti- sources
vaccination beliefs
*Anachronies in mystery Anachronies make stories more Sobchuk &
movies (becoming more interesting (non-chronological order Tinits, 2020
frequent, 1970-2009) provokes viewers’ curiosity)
Vampires Minimally counterintuitive concept; Bahna, 2015
disgust, contagion
*Semantic drift in Memory effects: words known to be Lerique & Roth,
quotations in blogs harder to recall in lists have a higher 2018
tendency to be substituted, and
words easier to recall are produced
instead
*Norms related to disgust Disgust Nichols, 2002
(survived better from the
16th century than norms
unrelated to disgust)
Table 1. Examples of case studies identifying causal factors explaining specific
attractors. Empirical (quantitative) case studies are marked by an asterisk (*). This table
is indicative of the variety of cultural phenomena that have used cultural attraction theory
but is not meant to be an exhaustive list of case studies.

Future directions
Cultural attraction theory provides several future directions for cultural evolution. One
first direction for future research is to use cultural attraction theory as a generative
framework for case studies. Several features and tools of cultural attraction theory have
been relatively under-exploited so far, despite their potential to push cultural evolution
beyond thinking in terms of a mix of faithful transmission and biases. Both ecological

17
factors of attraction and causal chains have been under-exploited. Most case works in
cultural evolution have focused on cognitive factors of attractions, while ecological
factors of attraction have remained under-studied (with the exception of Miton, Wolf, et
al., 2020). Other factors, like the role played by institutions, might not fall so clearly on
one side or the other of the cognitive – ecological distinction, and might require
expanding the typology of factors of attraction in future research. Cultural causal chains
have also been a relatively under-used tool from the cultural attraction conceptual
toolbox. Exploring the typology of different causal chains would also open possibilities
to connect to literature on networks and their effects on information transmission.

As it has been noticed elsewhere (e.g., Acerbi & Mesoudi, 2015; Sterelny, 2017), cultural
attraction has also been disproportionately applied to specific domains of culture, and in
particular, to this date, no study applied cultural attraction to domains like technology –
which are traditionally associated to the idea of “cumulative cultural evolution”, in which
some innovations are retained and accumulated over time, leading to overall
improvement. There is a certain amount of skepticism with regard to whether cultural
attraction could account for domains more typically thought of as “cumulative” and
consequential for the fitness of the individuals who master them, like technologies (e.g.,
Acerbi & Mesoudi, 2015; Sterelny, 2017). Yet, cultural attraction theory could, at least in
principle, accommodate diverse causal factors, including the role of already existing
technology, or possibly competing pressures from learning to use technical tools versus
improving them. Recent work suggest that technical reasoning is a source of convergent
transformations which can create cumulative improvements, at least in experimental
contexts (Osiurak et al., 2022).

Cultural attraction theory’s affinities with cognitive science make it an especially

promising framework for domains in which cognitive processes and constraints can be
expected to have a strong influence – for instance, in the arts and other domains
studied by (digital) humanities (e.g., Miton, Sperber, et al., 2020; Morin, 2013; Sobchuk,
2018). Other applications of cultural attraction might be outside of cultural evolution per
se – for instance as part of the study of collective memory (Hirst et al., 2018) or in
cognitive science at large (Barrett, 2020).

18
Finally, an open question for future research is whether cultural attraction is reconcilable
with other frameworks in cultural evolution, and what would such a synthesis in cultural
evolution be like? Some of the intuitions put forward by cultural attraction theory have
far-reaching implications for setting cultural evolution’s agenda. Because of its relative
agnosticism about mechanisms sustaining cultural evolution, cultural attraction fully
considers the possibility that cultural phenomena are sustained by a large diversity of
mechanisms. Cultural attraction theory’s requirements tend to be rather loose: any
mechanism or causal factor, at any scale deemed relevant – from individual interactions
to environmental factors applying globally, as long as it is able to contribute to stability of
cultural phenomena at the populational level. In turn, this can both accommodate
mechanisms put forward by other frameworks (e.g., selectionist models) and open the
door for explanations for culture and cultural phenomena that a larger diversity of
factors in what sustain cultural phenomena, including human adaptations not selected for
cultural transmission per se (e.g., mind-reading, or abilities for joint action, which might
have been selected for in virtue of the importance of cooperation for our species).

19
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