本科毕业论文文献资料阅读综述表.doc

本科毕业论文文献资料阅读综述表 名称 Cultural evolution: The case of babies’ first names 类型（Journal） 书籍 页数: 6 作者 西宁 出处 /locate/physa,2014 Cultural evolution: The case of babies’ first names 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. Cultural evolution is the dynamical process by which the popularity of cultural traits changes over time. Remarkably, at all times the evolution presents the similar patterns: a relatively small number of cultural traits are highly popular while the majority gets little attention. Moreover, the level of such inequality varies along with the evolution of culture. In the past decades, a wide range of studies have been carried out to uncover the mechanism generating inequality. One explanation, presented by Rosen and MacDonald, is that inequality is caused by the differential quality of cultural traits and can be reproduced by the convexity of the mapping from quality to popularity. An alternative explanation, firstly proposed by Adler, asserts that individual decision is influenced by the behaviors of others, which lead to inequality. In order to test the validity of the theories, Hamlen empirically examined the relationship between voice quality and record sales in the popular music industry , and discovered that the percentage cha