In line with DeDeo, the concept was to look at the query of cultural evolution on a inhabitants degree, slightly than on the person degree: “How do these particular person issues agglomerate to provide the tradition? “
Sturdy constructive correlation is discovered between the response variables apart from the Kudos-to-hits ratio. Matter novelty is weakly positively correlated with Kudos-to-hits ratio however negatively correlated with the opposite response variables.
Credit score:
E. Jing et al., 2025
The outcomes have been placing. AO3 members overwhelmingly most popular familiarity of their fan fiction, i.e., extra of the identical. One notable exception was a brief story that was each massively in style and extremely novel. Merely titled “I Am Groot,” the story featured the character from Guardians of the Galaxy. The textual content is simply “I’m Groot” repeated 40,000 instances—a stroke of genius in that that is fully according to the canonical MCU character, whose total dialogue consists of these phrases, with which means conveyed by shifts of tone and context. However such exceptions proved to be very uncommon.
“We have been so surprised that stability concept wasn’t working,” stated DeDeo, who credit Jing with the conclusion that they have been coping with two distinct items of the puzzle: how a lot is being consumed, and the way a lot folks like what they eat, i.e., enjoyment. Their evaluation revealed, first, that individuals actually don’t desire an optimized mixture of acquainted and new; they need the identical factor over and over, even throughout the fanfic group. However when folks do take the time to strive one thing new, they have a tendency to take pleasure in it extra than simply consuming extra of the identical.
Briefly, “We’re anti-balance concept,” stated DeDeo. “In biology, for instance, you make a small variation within the species and also you get micro-evolution. In tradition, a minor variation is simply much less more likely to be consumed. So it truly is a thriller how we evolve in any respect culturally; it isn’t taking place by gradual motion. We will see that there is novelty. We will see that when folks encounter novelty, they take pleasure in it. However we won’t fairly make sense of how these two competing results work out.”
