Culture
Nov 18, 2019
People don’t just learn and reason in isolation: we are inherently social animals, embedded in a complex and ever-changing social and cultural system. Not only does this system – and the social assumptions we make about it – shape our cognition, but our choices and actions change that system as well. I’m interested in understanding both aspects of this process, primarily by conceptualising people as information-processing agents and studying culture as an emergent phenomenon of information transmission between people.
Current projects focus mostly on the dynamics of information transmission, the maintenance and emergence of social norms, polarisation, and misinformation propagation.
Andrew Perfors
Professor
I seek to understand how people reason and think, both on their own and in groups.
Publications
Viola Pucci, Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors
(2023).
Online communication to the ingroup and the outgroup: The role of identity in the "what" and "why" of information sharing.
In M Goldwater and F Anggoro and B Hayes and D Ong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Manuscript under review.
Piers Howe, Andrew Perfors, Keith Ransom, Bradley Walker, Nicolas Fay, Yoshihisa Kashima, Morgan Saletta
(2023).
Self-censorship appears to be an effective way of reducing the spread of misinformation on social media.
In M Goldwater and F Anggoro and B Hayes and D Ong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Manuscript under review.
Paul Garrett, Joshua White, Yin Luo, Simon Dennis, Nic Geard, Daniel Little, Lewis Mitchell, Andrew Perfors, Martin Tomko, Giulia Andrighetto, Takashi Kusumi, Ralph Hertwig, Stefan Herzog, Anastasia Kozyreva, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Thorsten Pachur, Shulan Hsieh, Yi-Chan Lee, Cheng-Ta Yang, Yasmina Okan, Elena Andrade, Luis Velay, Klaus Oberauer, Robert Goldstone, Stephan Lewandowsky, Yoshihisa Kashima
(2023).
COVID-19, national culture, and privacy calculus: Factors predicting the cross-cultural acceptance and uptake of contact-tracing technologies.
Manuscript.
Paul Garrett, Joshua White, Simon Dennis, Stephan Lewandowsky, Cheng-Ta Yang, Yasmina Okan, Andrew Perfors, Daniel Little, Anastasia Kozyreva, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Takashi Kusumi, Yoshihisa Kashima
(2022).
Papers please - Predictive factors of national and international attitudes toward immunity and vaccination passports: Online representative surveys.
JMIR Public Health Surveill 8(7): e32969.
Andrew Perfors
(2022).
Information processing and societal threat.
In Y Kashima and A Filkinkov and L Falzon and M Wood and R Ackland and L Mitchell (Eds.) Societal threat, psychosocial security, and collective information processing. Manuscript.
Emma Baillie, Piers Howe, Andrew Perfors, Tim Miller, Yoshihisa Kashima, Andreas Beger
(2021).
Explainable models for forecasting the emergence of political instability.
PLoS ONE 16(7): e0254350.
Nicolas Fay, Bradley Walker, Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors
(2021).
Socially situated transmission: The bias to transmit negative information is moderated by the social context.
Cognitive Science 45(9): e13033.
Keith Ransom, Andrew Perfors, Rachel Stephens
(2021).
Social meta-inference and the evidentiary value of consensus.
In T Fitch and C Lamm and H Leder and K Tessmar-Raible (Eds.) Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 833-839.
Piers Howe, Andrew Perfors, Keith Ransom
(2021).
What interventions and increase or decrease polarisation in a population of rational agents?.
In T Fitch and C Lamm and H Leder and K Tessmar-Raible (Eds.) Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 1733-1739.
Yoshihisa Kashima, Simon Dennis, Andrew Perfors, Simon Laham
(2021).
Culture and global societal threats: COVID-19 as a pathogen threat to humanity.
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 24(2): 223-230.
Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors, Vanessa Ferdinand, Elle Pattenden
(2021).
Ideology, communication, and polarisation.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376: 20200133.
Stephan Lewandowsky, Simon Dennis, Andrew Perfors, Yoshihisa Kashima, Joshua White, Paul Garrett, Daniel Little, Muhsin Yesilada
(2021).
Public acceptance of privacy-encroaching policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.
PLoS ONE 16(1): e0245740.
Paul Garrett, Joshua White, Stephan Lewandowsky, Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors, Daniel Little, Nic Geard, Lewis Mitchell, Martin Tomko, Simon Dennis
(2021).
The acceptability and uptake of smartphone tracking for COVID-19 in Australia.
PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244827.
Vanessa Ferdinand, Andrew Perfors
(2020).
The evolution of category systems within and between learners.
In S Denison, M Mack, Y Xu, and B Armstrong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 648-654.
Campbell Pryor, Andrew Perfors, Piers Howe
(2019).
Conformity to the descriptive norms of people with opposing political or social beliefs.
PLoS ONE 14(7): e0219464.
Campbell Pryor, Andrew Perfors, Piers Howe
(2019).
Even arbitrary norms influence moral decision-making.
Nature Human Behaviour 3: 57-62.
Yoshihisa Kashima, Paul Bain, Andrew Perfors
(2019).
The psychology of cultural dynamics: What is it, what do we know, and what is yet to be known?.
Annual Review of Psychology 70: 499-529.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2019).
Why do echo chambers form? The role of trust, population heterogeneity, and objective truth.
In A Goel, C Seifert, and C Freksa (Eds.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 918-923.
Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors, Arthur Kary, Scott Brown, Chris Donkin
(2018).
When extremists win: Cultural transmission via iterated learning when populations are heterogeneous.
Cognitive Science 42: 2108-2149.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro, Patrick Shafto
(2018).
Stronger evidence isn't always better: A role for social inference in evidence selection and interpretation.
In C Kalish, M Rau, J Zhu and T Rogers (Eds.) Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 864-869.
Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors, Arthur Kary, Scott Brown, Chris Donkin
(2017).
When extremists win: On the behavior of iterated learning chains when priors are heterogeneous.
In G Gunzelmann, A Howes, T Tenbrink, and E Davelaar (Eds.) Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 847-852.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2014).
Language evolution can be shaped by the structure of the world.
Cognitive Science 38(4): 775-793.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2011).
Language evolution is shaped by the structure of the world: An iterated learning analysis.
In L Carlson (Ed.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 477-482.
Andrew Perfors
(2002).
Simulated evolution of language: A review of the field.
*Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 5(2).
Andrew Perfors
(2000).
Simulated evolution of communication: The emergence of meaning.
MA Thesis. Stanford University Linguistics Department. Stanford, CA.