#734 Helena Miton: Cognitive Science, Cultural Transmission, and Tacit Knowledge
RECORDED ON OCTOBER 27th 2022.
Dr. Helena Miton is Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Miton’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices.
In this episode, we talk about how we can study culture through cognitive science. We discuss lab studies and their limitations. We talk about mechanisms of cultural transmission, and cultural stability. We discuss if cumulative culture needs high-fidelity copying. We go through cultural phenomena like maladaptive medical practices, and the evolution of complexity in graphic communication systems, like heraldry and writing. We discuss how we go from small-scale interactions to large-scale cultural productions. Finally, we talk about the cultural transmission of tacit knowledge.
Time Links:
Intro
Cognitive science and the study of culture
Studying culture in the lab
Mechanisms of cultural transmission
Cultural stability
Cumulative culture and high-fidelity copying
Selection in cultural evolution
How can maladaptive medical practices, like bloodletting, thrive culturally?
How complexity evolves in graphic communication systems, like heraldry and writing
How do we go from small-scale interactions to large-scale cultural productions?
The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
Follow Dr. Miton’s work!
Follow Dr. Miton’s work:
University page: https://bit.ly/3bekL9H
Works on ResearchGate: https://bit.ly/3xEh8RE
Twitter handle: @HelenaMiton