title: The Semantic Drift of Quotations in Blogspace: A Case Study in Short-Term Cultural Evolution.
abstract: We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well-studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.
authors.affiliation: Center for Social Analysis and Mathematics, CNRS and EHESS.|Centre Marc Bloch Berlin e.V.
authors.forename: Sébastien
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lerique
authors.affiliation: Centre Marc Bloch Berlin e.V.|Sciences Po, médialab.
authors.forename: Camille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Roth
mesh_terms: D057218:Blogging; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D006801:Humans; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods*; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Big data; Cultural attraction; Cultural evolution; Data mining; Psycholinguistics; Recollection bias; Semantic network; Word recall