2:00 pm: Andrea Baronchelli (City University London)

The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Conventions: An Experimental Study of Cultural Evolution

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such institutions are not necessary in order for social conventions to form. However, empirical tests of this hypothesis have been hindered by the difficulties of evaluating the real-time creation of new collective behaviors in large decentralized populations. Here, I will present experimental results—replicated at several scales—that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions and show how simple changes in a population’s network structure can direct the dynamics of norm formation, driving human populations with no ambition for large scale coordination to rapidly evolve shared social conventions. I will also show that a simple model describes well the experimental results on different classes of social networks.

Reference: D. Centola and A. Baronchelli, “The spontaneous emergence of conventions: An experimental study of cultural evolution”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 112, 1989 (2015) (more info here: http://bit.ly/1U3L7YF).

3:00-3:15 Break

3:15 pm: Jonas Nölle (Aarhus University)

Environmental motivation of linguistic routines

In this talk I will present experimental data showing how linguistic conventions that arise in collaborative dialogues are constrained by environmental affordances. Participants solving the same maze task in different environments systematically aligned to different description strategies. This suggests ecological factors playing a role in interactive alignment and possibly in the emergence of specific linguistic features, which will be discussed subsequently.

4:00 pm: Peer Christensen (Lund University)

Environmental Constraints on Structure in Emerging Communication Systems

Recent gesture elicitation studies have indicated that constituent (word) order is highly influenced by cognitive biases. In these studies, participants consistently use SOV order (subject – object - verb) to represent transitive events using only their hands. In my talk, I will present recent findings from a series of experiments using a dialogical version of the task to investigate whether environmental and social-interactional constraints can motivate structure in emerging communication systems. In the first experiment, we tested the prediction that participants would predominantly follow a principle of structural iconicity by which intrinsic properties of two distinct event types are reflected in the selected gesture orders. Second, we tested the extent to which interactive alignment would further influence participants’ gesture production. Lastly, we investigated whether a skewed distribution of the two referent event types can result in the conventionalization of the order afforded by the most frequent event type.

Reference:

Christensen, P., Fusaroli, R., & Tylén, K. (2016). Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization. Cognition, 146, 67-80. (authors.elsevier.com/a/1RlI72Hx2Q8q7)

For questions please contact Riccardo Fusaroli: fusaroli@dac.au.dk