Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do societies develop categories for continuous sets of novel phenomena, as in the domains of art and technology?Seminal work in the nativist tradition argues that given the same stimuli, people can independently produce the samecategories as a result of universal cognitive constraints. These constraints are said to account for cross-group coherence,where distinct communities and cultures have been shown to arrive at highly similar categories. Cross-group coherence iswidely seen as incompatible with functionalism, which holds that categories are defined through communication, leadingto divergent category systems. Here, we use an experiment to demonstrate that communication can generate either thedivergence or convergence of category systems, depending on the size of the social network (2, 6, 8, 24, and 50). We findthat large social networks amplify population biases, where a subset of slightly more frequent words become exponentiallymore likely to spread as network size increases.