Modeling Culture

What is culture, and how can we model it? This course surveys theoretical frameworks for studying culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on evolutionary biology, sociology, psychology, and economics. We will examine the foundations of cultural cognition and the social and structural processes that shape culture's emergence and evolution. We will also explore methods for measuring culture and modeling cultural processes, including ethnography and survey research, with particular emphasis on computational methods and large language models. Students will develop agent-based models of cultural dynamics and engage in in-depth discussions of cultural theory.