John Levi Martin once remarked that “if one were to take a picture of some well-populated area from a low-orbiting satellite, and marked a spot wherever there was a car, one would be able to figure out rather well where the roads were, and where cars were allowed to go.”
A new study by Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa (UC Davis) and Turgut Keskintürk (Duke University) takes this idea a step further, arguing that just as traffic patterns reveal roads, the movement of people’s beliefs over time can reveal the structure of culture itself. Their research, published in Poetics as part of the Special Issue on Duality in the Study of Culture and Society, introduces a gravitational model of cultural change that treats cultural beliefs and preferences ranging from religiosity and morality to politics as positions in a shifting landscape.
Their findings reveal that, if people change their beliefs, they are more likely to shift toward widely held positions, much like gravity pulling objects toward a dense mass. Going back to classical sociological studies by Ronald Breiger and J. Miller McPherson, the study advances an ecological understanding of how individuals form cultural, moral, and political beliefs.
By bridging insights from cultural sociology, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory, the authors argue that future research should focus not just on individual belief change or how beliefs are shaped by social structures, but on the structure of culture itself, which makes certain changes more or less likely over time.
For more details, check out the full study in Poetics:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X24001037
