A step-by-step method for cultural annotation by LLMs.

Building on the growing body of research highlighting the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), this paper presents a structured pipeline for the annotation of cultural (big) data through such LLMs, offering a detailed methodology for leveraging GPT's computational abilities. Our approach provides researchers across various fields with a method for efficient and scalable analysis of cultural phenomena, showcasing the potential of LLMs in the empirical study of human cultures. LLMs proficiency in processing and interpreting complex data finds relevance in tasks such as annotating descriptions of non-industrial societies, measuring the importance of specific themes in stories, or evaluating psychological constructs in texts across societies or historical periods. These applications demonstrate the model's versatility in serving disciplines like cultural anthropology, cultural psychology, cultural history, and cultural sciences at large.

'Our Roots Run Deep': Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment.

One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences.

Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation.

Cultural technologies for peace may have shaped our social cognition.

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

Cognitive fossils: using cultural artifacts to reconstruct psychological changes throughout history.

Psychology is crucial for understanding human history. When aggregated, changes in the psychology of individuals - in the intensity of social trust, parental care, or intellectual curiosity - can lead to important changes in institutions, social norms, and cultures. However, studying the role of psychology in shaping human history has been hindered by the difficulty of documenting the psychological traits of people who are no longer alive. Recent developments in psychology suggest that cultural artifacts reflect in part the psychological traits of the individuals who produced or consumed them. Cultural artifacts can thus serve as 'cognitive fossils' - physical imprints of the psychological traits of long-dead people. We review the range of materials available to cognitive and behavioral scientists, and discuss the methods that can be used to recover and quantify changes in psychological traits throughout history.

Reproductive Strategies and Romantic Love in Early Modern Europe.

In Western Europe, the Early Modern Period is characterized by the rise of tenderness in romantic relationships and the emergence of companionate marriage. Despite a long research tradition, the origins of these social changes remain elusive. In this paper, we build on recent advances in behavioral sciences, showing that romantic emotional investment, which is more culturally variable than sexual attraction, enhances the cohesion of long-term relationships and increases investment in children. Importantly, this long-term strategy is considered especially advantageous when living standards are high. Here, we investigate the relationship between living standards, the emotional components of love expressed in fiction work, and behavioral outcomes related to pair bonding, such as nuptial and fertility rates. We developed natural language processing measures of "emotional investment" (tenderness) and "attraction" (passion) and computed romantic love in English plays (N = 847) as a ratio between the two. We found that living standards generally predicted and temporally preceded variations of romantic love in the Early Modern Period. Furthermore, romantic love preceded an increase in nuptial rates and a decrease in births per marriage. This suggests that increasing living standards in the Early Modern Period may have contributed to the emergence of modern romantic culture.

The puritanical moral contract: Purity, cooperation, and the architecture of the moral mind.

Commentators raise fundamental questions about the notion of purity (sect. R1), the architecture of moral cognition (sect. R2), the functional relationship between morality and cooperation (sect. R3), the role of folk-theories of self-control in moral judgment (sect. R4), and the cultural variation of morality (sect. R5). In our response, we address all these issues by clarifying our theory of puritanism, responding to counter-arguments, and incorporating welcome corrections and extensions.

Reciprocal contracts - not competitive acquisition - explain the moral psychology of ownership.

We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about the calculation of mutually beneficial, reciprocal contracts.

Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint.

Standard approaches to cultural evolution focus on the recipients or consumers. This does not take into account the fitness costs incurred in producing the behaviours or artefacts that become cultural, i.e. widespread in a social group. We argue that cultural evolution models should focus on these fitness costs and benefits of cultural production, particularly in the domain of 'symbolic' culture. In this approach, cultural products can be considered as a part of the extended phenotype of producers, which can affect the fitness of recipients in a positive way (through cooperation) but also in a detrimental way (through manipulation and exploitation). Taking the producers' perspective may help explain the specific features of many kinds of cultural products.

Using portraits to quantify the changes of generalized social trust in European history: A replication study.

A portrait is an exercise of impression management: the sitter can choose the impression she or he wants to create in the eyes of others': competence, trustworthiness, dominance, etc. Indirectly, this choice informs us about the qualities that were specifically valued at the time the portrait was created. In a previous paper, we have shown that cues of perceived trustworthiness in portraits increased in time during the modern period in Europe, meaning that people probably granted more importance to be seen as a trustworthy person. Moreover, this increase is correlated to economic development. In this study, we aim to replicate this result, using more controlled databases: 1) a newly created database of European head-of-state sovereigns (N = 966, from 1400 to 2020), that is a database of individuals holding the same social position across time and countries, and 2) a database of very high-quality portraits digitized with the same technique, and coming from the same Museum, the Chateau de Versailles database (N = 2,291, from 1483 to 1938). Using mixed effects linear models, we observed in the first dataset that the modeled perceived facial trustworthiness of these sovereigns' faces increased over time (b = 0.182 ± 0.04 s.e.m., t(201) = 4.40, p < 0.001). On the opposite, no effect of time was detected on the portraits of the Château de Versailles (b = - 0.02 ± 0.03 s.e.m., t(759) = - 0.85, p > .250). We conclude by discussing the potential of this new technique to uncover long-term behavioral changes in history, as well as its limitations.

Quantifying the scientific revolution.

The Scientific Revolution represents a turning point in the history of humanity. Yet it remains ill-understood, partly because of a lack of quantification. Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies (N = 22,943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300-1850). Our data reveal striking differences across countries, with England and the United Provinces being much more creative than other countries, suggesting that economic development has been key in generating the Scientific Revolution. In line with recent results in behavioural sciences, we show that scientific creativity and economic development are associated with other kinds of creative activities in philosophy, literature, music and the arts, as well as with inclusive institutions and ascetic religiosity, suggesting a common underlying mindset associated with long-term orientation and exploration. Finally, we investigate the interplay between economic development and cultural transmission (the so-called 'Republic of Letters') using partially observed Markov models imported from population biology. Surprisingly, the role of horizontal transmission (from one country to another) seems to have been marginal. Beyond the case of science, our results suggest that economic development is an important factor in the evolution of aspects of human culture.

Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.

Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), movies (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because they activate exploratory preferences that evolved to help us navigate the real world and find new fitness-relevant information. Therefore, we hypothesize that the attraction to imaginary worlds is intrinsically linked to the desire to explore novel environments and that both are influenced by the same underlying factors. Notably, the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of the preference for imaginary worlds should follow the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of exploratory preferences (with the personality trait Openness-to-experience, age, sex, and ecological conditions). We test these predictions with both experimental and computational methods. For experimental tests, we run a pre-registered online experiment about movie preferences (N = 230). For computational tests, we leverage two large cultural datasets, namely the Internet Movie Database (N = 9424 movies) and the Movie Personality Dataset (N = 3.5 million participants), and use machine-learning algorithms (i.e., random forest and topic modeling). In all, consistent with how the human preference for spatial exploration adaptively varies, we provide empirical evidence that imaginary worlds appeal more to more explorative people, people higher in Openness-to-experience, younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the cultural evolution of narrative fiction and, more broadly, the evolution of human exploratory preferences.

When instrumental inference hides behind seemingly arbitrary conventions.

We review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as "ritualistic" conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively acquired and preserved because of their perceived utility.

Imaginary worlds through the evolutionary lens: Ultimate functions, proximate mechanisms, cultural distribution.

We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes.

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality.

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based "purity" concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind.

How to Develop Reliable Instruments to Measure the Cultural Evolution of Preferences and Feelings in History?

While we cannot directly measure the psychological preferences of individuals, and the moral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies of people from the past, we can use cultural artifacts as a window to the zeitgeist of societies in particular historical periods. At present, an increasing number of digitized texts spanning several centuries is available for a computerized analysis. In addition, developments form historical economics have enabled increasingly precise estimations of sociodemographic realities from the past. Crossing these datasets offer a powerful tool to test how the environment changes psychology and vice versa. However, designing the appropriate proxies of relevant psychological constructs is not trivial. The gold standard to measure psychological constructs in modern texts - Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) - has been validated by psychometric experimentation with modern participants. However, as a tool to investigate the psychology of the past, the LIWC is limited in two main aspects: (1) it does not cover the entire range of relevant psychological dimensions and (2) the meaning, spelling, and pragmatic use of certain words depend on the historical period from which the fiction work is sampled. These LIWC limitations make the design of custom tools inevitable. However, without psychometric validation, there is uncertainty regarding what exactly is being measured. To overcome these pitfalls, we suggest several internal and external validation procedures, to be conducted prior to diachronic analyses. First, the semantic adequacy of search terms in bags-of-words approaches should be verified by training semantic vector spaces with the historical text corpus using tools like word2vec. Second, we propose factor analyses to evaluate the internal consistency between distinct bag-of-words proxying the same underlying psychological construct. Third, these proxies can be externally validated using prior knowledge on the differences between genres or other literary dimensions. Finally, while LIWC is limited in the analysis of historical documents, it can be used as a sanity check for external validation of custom measures. This procedure allows a robust estimation of psychological constructs and how they change throughout history. Together with historical economics, it also increases our power in testing the relationship between environmental change and the expression of psychological traits from the past.

Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.

A central question in behavioral and social sciences is understanding to what extent cultural traits are inherited from previous generations, transmitted from adjacent populations or produced in response to changes in socioeconomic and ecological conditions. As quantitative diachronic databases recording the evolution of cultural artifacts over many generations are becoming more common, there is a need for appropriate data-driven methods to approach this question. Here we present a new Bayesian method to infer the dynamics of cultural traits in a diachronic dataset. Our method called Evoked-Transmitted Cultural model (ETC) relies on fitting a latent-state model where a cultural trait is a latent variable which guides the production of the cultural artifacts observed in the database. The dynamics of this cultural trait may depend on the value of the cultural traits present in previous generations and in adjacent populations (transmitted culture) and/or on ecological factors (evoked culture). We show how ETC models can be fitted to quantitative diachronic or synchronic datasets, using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, enabling estimating the relative contribution of vertical transmission, horizontal transmission and evoked component in shaping cultural traits. The method also allows to reconstruct the dynamics of cultural traits in different regions. We tested the performance of the method on synthetic data for two variants of the method (for binary or continuous traits). We found that both variants allow reliable estimates of parameters guiding cultural evolution, and that they outperform purely phylogenetic tools that ignore horizontal transmission and ecological factors. Overall, our method opens new possibilities to reconstruct how culture is shaped from quantitative data, with possible application in cultural history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics and behavioral ecology.

Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.

Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions are by-products of the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictions adaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen as entertainment technologies that is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people's attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner.