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AbstractInterventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution as a framework for addressing this contextual gap. We describe the history of behavioural science and the role that cultural evolution plays as a natural next step. We review research that may be considered cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy, and the promise and challenges to designing cultural evolution informed interventions. Finally, we discuss the value of applied research as a crucial test of basic science: if theories, laboratory and field experiments do not work in the real world, they do not work at all.

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior-largely independent of each other. Here we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene-environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and diffusion, density of cultural sub-groups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature-nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ.

Cultural evolutionary theories suggest that world religions have consolidated beliefs, values, and practices within a superethnic cultural identity. It follows that affiliation with religious traditions would be reliably associated with global variation in cultural traits. To test this hypothesis, we measured cultural distance between religious groups within and between countries, using the Cultural Fixation Index ([Formula: see text]) applied to the World Values Survey (88 countries, n = 243,118). Individuals who shared a religious tradition and level of commitment to religion were more culturally similar, both within and across countries, than those with different affiliations and levels of religiosity, even after excluding overtly religious values. Moreover, distances between denominations within a world religion echoed shared historical descent. Nonreligious individuals across countries also shared cultural values, offering evidence for the cultural evolution of secularization. While nation-states were a stronger predictor of cultural traits than religious traditions, the cultural similarity of coreligionists remained robust, controlling for demographic characteristics, geographic and linguistic distances between groups, and government restriction on religion. Together, results reveal the pervasive cultural signature of religion and support the role of world religions in sustaining superordinate identities that transcend geographical boundaries.

Abstract
Social group–based identities intersect. The meaning of "woman" is modulated by adding social class as in "rich woman" or "poor woman." How does such intersectionality operate at-scale in everyday language? Which intersections dominate (are most frequent)? What qualities (positivity, competence, warmth) are ascribed to each intersection? In this study, we make it possible to address such questions by developing a stepwise procedure, Flexible Intersectional Stereotype Extraction (FISE), applied to word embeddings (GloVe; BERT) trained on billions of words of English Internet text, revealing insights into intersectional stereotypes. First, applying FISE to occupation stereotypes across intersections of gender, race, and class showed alignment with ground-truth data on occupation demographics, providing initial validation. Second, applying FISE to trait adjectives showed strong androcentrism (Men) and ethnocentrism (White) in dominating everyday English language (e.g. White + Men are associated with 59% of traits; Black + Women with 5%). Associated traits also revealed intersectional differences: advantaged intersectional groups, especially intersections involving Rich, had more common, positive, warm, competent, and dominant trait associates. Together, the empirical insights from FISE illustrate its utility for transparently and efficiently quantifying intersectional stereotypes in existing large text corpora, with potential to expand intersectionality research across unprecedented time and place. This project further sets up the infrastructure necessary to pursue new research on the emergent properties of intersectional identities.

In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (FST), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes.

In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (F(ST)), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes.

Abstract