Project description
Studying children’s peer cultures
Research often depicts children as passive recipients of culture from adults rather than active cultural contributors. However, children’s peer cultures demonstrate remarkable continuity across generations. The ERC-funded ChACE project will investigate child and adolescent peer cultures to identify novel mechanisms of cultural evolution. The study will examine whether peer cultures exhibit distinct evolutionary processes compared to adult cultures and explore whether knowledge generated within these cultures helps communities adapt to social and ecological changes. Using ethnographically informed agent-based models, the project will generate testable predictions and validate them through studies involving children aged 4 to 16 and their caregivers in Toledo (Belize), Likouala (Republic of the Congo), the Omo Valley (Ethiopia), and County Durham (UK).
Objective
Cultural evolutionary theory is quickly gaining traction as a unifying framework for the social sciences. However, research into culture acquisition paints a picture of children as vessels for inheriting evolved culture from adults, rather than cultural producers in their own right. ChACE aims to overturn this long-established orthodoxy by taking child and adolescent peer cultures as a focal point. Neglected by cultural evolutionary theorists, peer cultures are incredibly well conserved across generations despite threats to social transmission inexistent in adult cultures, challenging our understanding of how cultures are maintained and changed across generations. By intensively studying childrens peer cultures, ChACE thus stands to discover novel causal mechanisms for cultural evolution. ChACE specifically advances two ground-breaking hypotheses built upon firm theoretical and empirical foundations in folklore, cultural evolution, human life history, and cognitive development: (1) Peer cultures evidence distinct cultural evolutionary mechanisms from adult cultures; (2) Knowledge produced as part of peer cultures helps communities adapt to social and ecological change. ChACE will develop a robust and transferable methodology to jumpstart the study of peer cultures. Reflecting best-practice workflows for causal analysis, ChACE will first build ethnographically informed agent-based models to derive testable and falsifiable predictions. These will be empirically evaluated via experiments, observations, surveys, and interviews with children and adolescents aged 4-16 years, and their caregivers, at four globally representative field sites undergoing rapid culture change: the Likouala (Republic of the Congo), the Omo Valley (Ethiopia), Toledo (Belize), and County Durham (U.K.). In doing so, ChACE will initiate a disciplinary course correction by driving forward an explicit and holistic account of childrens adaptive contributions to culture change.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology anthropology cultural anthropology folklore
- humanities history and archaeology history
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
DH1 3LE DURHAM
United Kingdom
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