In the thesis the dynamics of strategies is studied from two perspectives.In the first part of the thesis strategies are considered to be opinions present in a community. Firstly, the change of... Show moreIn the thesis the dynamics of strategies is studied from two perspectives.In the first part of the thesis strategies are considered to be opinions present in a community. Firstly, the change of support in time for two opinions is being analysed in case opinion bearers repeatedly meet in groups of size three. An opinion bearer is either an inflexible or a floater. An inflexible always adheres to the supported opinion, whereas a floater changes from opinion if the originally supported opinion has the minority in the group. A second chapter on opinion dynamics allows floaters to show either contrarian or non-contrarian behaviour. Both types of floaters adopt the opinion that has the majority in the group of size three, but a contrarian floater subsequently shifts to the alternative opinion.The second part deals with adaptive dynamics. Adaptive dynamics mathematically models the formation of evolutionary trees. The focus here is on phenotypic strategies present in ecological communities. The interest does not so much lie in the densities these strategies have, but in which strategies are present in the course of evolutionary time. The changes in presence are caused by repeated invasions of a mutant population in which the individuals express a strategy that deviates from those present in the invaded community. Show less
In this thesis, "culture" refers to the collection of subjective human traits, such as preferences an opinions, that a given, geographically bounded population has at a given moment in time.... Show moreIn this thesis, "culture" refers to the collection of subjective human traits, such as preferences an opinions, that a given, geographically bounded population has at a given moment in time. Representative samples of individuals from such populations are studied, focusing on individual opinions expressed on various topics, present in multivariate empirical data that had been previously collected, mainly via social surveys. We propose and exploit new methods for analyzing such data, relying on mathematical notions specific to statistical mechanics and information theory, but also on agent-based models/simulations of opinion/cultural dynamics driven by social influence. These methods provide new insights about how human culture is organized. They provide indications that cultural structure has universal properties, independent of the geographical region and of the set of survey questions. Furthermore, these properties suggest that culture is shaped around a small number of "rationalities", while also having a certain hierarchical organization that is robust to social influence dynamics. Finally, we propose a method of filtering the noise in the data, which seems to allow for the identification of cultural modules that are not visible otherwise. However, we also show that visible modules may well be just artifacts of survey design. Show less
