Alberto Acerbi

Website: acerbialberto.com "Cultural evolution in the digital age" (OUP): bit.ly/2McstmR "Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R" (Routledge): bit.ly/3MQBjT4 Substack (free - in italiano): bit.ly/3lDERMq

@Oliver_S_Curry :-(

World Happiness Report finds "a significant *positive* cross-country relationship between communication hours and life satisfaction (r = 0.46, p = .001)…*no* significant relationship between social media use and the relative happiness of the young" #smma #internet-use-social-media-and-teenage-life-satisfaction-in-47-countries" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/intern…

And learning is mostly interactive (vs individual or observational)

Cross-cultural analysis in non-industrial societies using eHRAF suggests toolmaking skill acquisition is mostly from kin (vs conformity or prestige) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Genuine question: excluding recent ones (e.g., smartphones, social media, genAI...), which technologies do you think made the human condition worse?

First guest lecture in my cultural analytics module! Thank you to Nadia von Jacobi, introducing a new ~27,000 folktales dataset, and testing presence of moral foundations themes. Preprint presenting the dataset: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Another proposal in line with "The cultural ecology of social media". Platforms reward engagement over accuracy: counter misinformation incentivising producers with a "Trust" button. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23…

Online success on social media is increasingly a question of how well posts serve the poster’s strategic goals (reputation/identity management, coalition building) and less of pure content transmission (and reader psychology), argues @acerbialberto: buff.ly/fDUfOYU

Consistent with the perspective in osf.io/preprints/soca…

Nice systematic review of how emotions affect engagements in social media. The effect is context- (e.g. negative bias in politics and positive in health) and platform-dependent. emerald.com/oir/article-ab…

What about evaluating researchers/academics on one paper/year at their choice?

Another article proposing to integrate an evolutionary framework in sociology link.springer.com/article/10.100…

As I switched completely to Claude in the last few weeks, I did feel a little sad for ChatGPT when I went there to ask for an image. Humans are weird.

@DavidPinsof @bsgallagher Same here! x.com/acerbialberto/…

@bsgallagher @acerbialberto There’s recent scholarly exchange between Nicolas Baumard / Jean Baptiste Andre and others in Evolution & Human Behavior on this. They argue that culture can be fully understood as a kind of ecology and should not be considered a distinct evolutionarily process. I’m sympathetic.

"...it remains unclear how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition. The study outlines four pathways: culture can privilege one cognitive process over another, prune out disfavored processes, produce new processes, or have no effect on cognition." cell.com/trends/cogniti…

Just published in "Current Anthropology". It reminds my struggle as undergrad, when I reckoned I was not deep enough to understand these stuff. Luckily I changed my mind.

Baumard & André answer to the commentaries to "The ecological approach to culture". An important conversation for everybody interested in application of evolutionary theory to culture. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Excellent point. Habits can be bad but they are not "addiction". And, if instead of pathologising, we think in these terms, we can create better habits for our social media usage. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

"our species has undergone more genetic change over the past ten thousand years than over the previous million"

Celebrating the sixth desk rejection for the same manuscript. 💪