The presence of a westward‐moving frontier of settlement shaped early US history. In 1893,
the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered …

Fashions and fads are important phenomena that influence many individual choices. They
are ubiquitous in human societies, and have recently been used as a source of data to test …

The resurgence of interest in collective behavior is in large part due to tools recently made
available for conducting laboratory experiments on groups, statistical methods for analyzing …

The very expertise with which psychologists wield their tools for achieving laboratory control
may have had the unwelcome effect of blinding psychologists to the possibilities of …

The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that copying is unbiased, provides
precise predictions regarding frequency distributions of traits and the turnover within a …

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others'
activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social …

Although it is known that certain names gain popularity within a culture because of historical
events, it is unknown how names become associated with different social categories in the …

This paper explores the age and gender distributions of the bearers of British forenames and
identifies key trends in British naming conventions. Age and gender characteristics are …

How do psychological processes shape how culture evolves? We investigated how a
cultural item's popularity is shaped by the recent popularity of other items with features in …

In the marketing literature, the 'K effect'refers to the claim that the letter K is overrepresented
as the initial letter of brand names. To date, however, most findings have only considered …