The Matthew effect describes the phenomenon that in societies, the rich tend to get richer
and the potent even more powerful. It is closely related to the concept of preferential …

Since the publication of “Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties” in 2007,
complex contagions have been studied across an enormous variety of social domains. In …

The standard measure of distance in social networks–average shortest path length–
assumes a model of “simple” contagion, in which people only need exposure to influence …

Many of the most important properties of human groups–including properties that may give
one group an evolutionary advantage over another–are properly defined only at the level of …

Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and
spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world …

The paper surveys recent research on language evolution, focusing in particular on models
of cultural evolution and how they are being developed and tested using agent-based …

We introduce a model for the emergence of innovations, in which cognitive processes are
described as random walks on the network of links among ideas or concepts, and an …

Phase transitions--changes between different states of organization in a complex system--
have long helped to explain physics concepts, such as why water freezes into a solid or …

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication
systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment …

An argument that the meaning of written or auditory linguistic signals is not derived from the
input but results from the brain's internal construction process. When we read a text or listen …