All Roads Lead to Polenta: Cultural Attractors at the Junction of Public and Personal Culture

Abstract

In the process of retelling information, individuals often inadvertently transform it to be more consistent with their cultural schemas. We explore the long-term cultural change inherent in this process, focusing on utterances about cultural tastes as our case study (e.g., music, food, and outdoor hobbies). We use a word embedding model to simulate a “telephone game” where each actor partially hears an utterance, uses their cultural schemas to guess the missing word, and tells the result to the next actor. While laboratory “telephone games” explore short transmission chains of approximately four steps, our approach lets us simulate these chains out to 1000 steps. We find that these chains are often pulled toward powerful “cultural attractors”—essentially points of least resistance where communications end up through transmission error alone. Moreover, some attractors operate across taste domains: transmission chains gravitate toward these attractors regardless of which cultural domain they begin in. The most powerful such attractor we located concerns high-status, broadly liked food. Taste in food may thus have an underappreciated centrality within personal taste: verbal accounts describing taste in food may be particularly stable across multiple retellings, while accounts about other taste domains may become transformed into accounts of taste in food.