Fiona Jordan (University of Bristol)
Social scientists who seek explanations for the foundations of social norms and conventions must engage with primary data: the diversity of contemporary and ethnographically-attested cultural phenomena. Explaining cultural diversity requires a multi-level approach in order to connect any proposed foundations or origins to their manifestations across thousands of human cultural groups. Cultural evolutionary approaches allow us to use the tools of evolutionary analysis in a variety of empirical paradigms to understand the trajectories of change in human social and cultural norms. Here I describe two research projects that can inform the space of possibilities for conventions of any kind.
