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CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Predicting societal-level cultural change

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 538–539 (2018)Cite this article

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By analysing whether characteristics of Austronesian populations could predict the rate of adoption of Christianity, researchers find that political leadership and small population sizes facilitated Christianity’s spread in the Pacific.

Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, Joseph Watts and colleagues offer a new study of broad cultural change at the societal level5. Analysing a database of cultural, historical and demographic information, the authors assess the adoption of Christianity in 70 Austronesian populations in the Pacific that were contacted by missionaries between 1668 and 1950. Watts and colleagues use a relatively new method, spatial phylogenetic generalized least squares6, that allows them to assess the factors influencing the rate of adoption of Christianity in each population while controlling for both population relatedness and geographic proximity. This method has extraordinary potential in the study of cultural evolution, as both common ancestry and shared environmental factors can contribute to cultural similarities.

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References

  1. Rogers, E. M. Diffusion of Innovations (Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 2010).

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  5. Watts, J., Sheehan, O., Bulbulia, J., Gray, R. D. & Atkinson, Q. D. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0379-3 (2018).

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Nicole Creanza

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  1. Nicole Creanza
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Correspondence to Nicole Creanza.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Creanza, N. Predicting societal-level cultural change. Nat Hum Behav 2, 538–539 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0396-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0396-2

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