Cultural attractor theory

Cultural attractor theory focuses on how ideas being modified as they are transmitted between humans effects cultural evolution. In cultural attractor theory, a cultural attractor is a "destination" that cultural ideas tend to go towards over time. To say that there is an attractor is just to say that, in a given space of possibilities, transformation probabilities form a certain pattern: they tend to be biased so as to favor transformations in the direction of some specific point, and therefore cluster at and around that point.^[1] Cultural attraction theory explains why some representations, practices and artifacts are more prevalent and robustly transmitted than others by looking at the micro-mechanisms involved in their transmission.^[2]

A good example of a cultural attractor is language learnability. It has been demonstrated that learners bias the evolution of language towards learnability.^[3] This could explain why words can exhibit a high level of macro stability, and why the most frequent and stable words are also the shortest.^[4]

The transmission chain method may be used to study cultural attractors.^[5]