We found that childhood exploration helps individual problem solving, but cumulative cultural evolution drowns out the individual effect

We set out to understand if childhood exploration drives problem solving and innovation in cumulative cultural evolution

And of course @carlsbergfondet.dk for the financial support.

Huge thanks to our organising team @felixthehauskat.bsky.social, @sheinalew.bsky.social, @ndersen.bsky.social, @mathildevm.bsky.social, Luseadra McKerracher, and everyone who joined us from near and (very) far.

Now with a more user friendly version here:
www.aesthetics.mpg.de/forschung/fo...

Finally, we propose emotional support as a key moderator of norm change in the domain of fertility, with implications for cultural change more broadly

We identify changes in friendship composition and in the types of support that flow across these relationships, and link these changes to key reproductive attitudes and values – this shift seems to be driven by educated women who exchange more emotional support with (nonkin) friends

We focus on close personal networks to understand mechanistically the spread of reproductive cultural norms - we use causal inference techniques and (many!) hierarchical Bayesian models to understand how personal support networks change in communities experiencing social and economic shifts