Sociology

Alien

Natural (archaeology)

Attraction

Population

Mathematics

Biology

Evolutionary psychology

Epistemology

Demography

Library science

Philosophy

Paleontology

Psychology

Geometry

Naturalization

Subject (documents)

Character (mathematics)

Computer science

Linguistics

Naturalism

Census

Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews

Cultural attraction theory (CAT) is a research agenda the purpose of which is to develop causal explanations of cultural phenomena. CAT is also an evolutionary approach to culture, in the sense that it treats culture as a population of items of different types, with the frequency of tokens of those types changing over time. Now more than 20 years old, CAT has made many positive contributions, theoretical and empirical, to the naturalization of the social sciences. In consequence of this growing impact, CAT has, in recent years, been the subject of critical discussion. Here, we review and respond to these critiques. In so doing, we also provide a clear and concise introduction to CAT. We give clear characterizations of CAT's key theoretical notions, and we outline how these notions are derived from consideration of the natural character of cultural phenomena (Box ). This naturalistic quality distinguishes CAT from other evolutionary approaches to culture.

Four misunderstandings about cultural attraction