Many Culture Causes

I asked a set of polls, and 3 LLMs (ChatGPT,Claude,Gemini) to rate the relative explanatory power of the following 16 causes of cultural change for the two periods 1700-1900 and 1900-2025. I asked polls re picking 1 of 4 causes, and asked LLMs to think of 50 culture changes in each period, score each cause on a 0-10 scale re each change, and then add up scores per cause. (I also asked Grok, but its rounded sums suggested that it lied about generating detailed scores.)

• Elite Youth Culture - Rise of high school and college, youth culture and movements; changes had to appeal to elite youths.

• Lazy/Myopic/Selfish/Pleas - Revert to be more lazy, myopic, selfish, pleasure-oriented.

• Forager Reversion - Revert to forager styles: more art, leisure, democracy, and equality, and less religion, fertility, and domination.

• Individualism, Authentic - Rise in status of individualism, authenticity: think for yourself, follow your heart, be true to yourself.

• Innovate, Explore, Create - Rise in status of innovation, exploration, creativity.

• Abstract Concept, Reason - Rise in status of more abstract concepts and reasoning.

• Rich, Safe, Trade/Talk - Stuff that appeals more to people who are richer and safer, with more/wider talk/travel/trade.

• Merging Culture Appeal - Stuff accessible to and can appeal to the wide range of cultures merging in this period.

• Fashion/Elite Displace - Rise in fashion as change process; changes must appeal to elites seeking to displace other elites.

• Media/Word Legibile - Legibility of change symbols to spread via words and mass media.

• Big Org/Inst. Codify - New stuff can be seen and codified by our new large orgs and institutions.

• Sounds Good, Short-Run - Prefer stuff that sounds good and shows visible short-run gains.

• Visible Sacrifice - Visible sacrifices show allegiance; we figure we value what we’ve seen recent big visible sacrifices for.

• Lose Religion/Fragment - Loss of religion and traditions as core cultural glues induce fragmentation, divergence.

• Low War/Internal Polarize - Less war and outside threats make more wealth inequality, stronger internal conflict, polarization.

• Adapt Tech/Demography - Sensible adaptation to other behavior changes, not of culture type, eg, tech, demographic, and business practices.

Here are priority out of 100 poll scores, and median of the 3 LLM sum scores:

Scores don’t vary that much, correlations between sources are weak, and I overall disagree a lot with them. From which I conclude that either this is quite hard to figure out, and/or there really were quite a few strong causes.