Cultural evolution: The case of babies’ first names

Ning Xi, Zi-Ke Zhang, Yi-Cheng Zhang, Zehui Ge, Li She and Kui Zhang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2014, vol. 406, issue C, 139-144

Abstract: In social sciences, there is currently rare consensus on the underlying mechanism for cultural evolution, partially due to lack of suitable data. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for such researches. In this paper, we employ the historical data on baby names from the United States to investigate the evolutionary process of culture, in particular focusing on how inequality among baby names changes over time. Then we propose a stochastic model where individual choice is determined by both individual preference and social influence, and show that the decrease in the strength of social influence can account for all the observed empirical features. Therefore, we claim that the weakening of social influence drives cultural evolution.

Keywords: Social influence; Individual preference; Inequality; Simpson’s index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:406:y:2014:i:c:p:139-144

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.03.042

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