**Sept 27. Week 6: Cultural Evolution**
In which we learn how culture itself can be considered subject to evolutionary forces, and examine how humans might have been “selected for” the ability to absorb and create culture. We also discuss two example cases: the evolution of a culture of honor and the evolution of cooperation.
**Readings**
Martin, D., Hutchison, J., Slessor, G., Urquhart, J., Cunningham, S. J., & Smith, K. (2014). The spontaneous formation of stereotypes via cumulative cultural evolution. *Psychological Science, 25*(9), 1777-1786.
Henrich, J., & McElreath, R. (2003). The evolution of cultural evolution. *Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 12*(3), 123-135.
Nowak, A., Gelfand, M. J., Borkowski, W., Cohen, D., & Hernandez, I. (2016). The evolutionary basis of honor cultures. *Psychological Science, 27*(1), 12-24.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2009). Culture and the evolution of human cooperation. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 364*(1533), 3281-3288.
For the ambitious (optional):
Smaldino, P. E. (2014). The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traits. *Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37*(03), 243-254.
Mesoudi, A. (2009). How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology and vice versa. *Psychological Review, 116*(4), 929-952.
