时间：2026年10月22日（周四）中午 12:00
地点：清华大学吕大龙楼11层1100
报告主题：Ecological Origins and Historical Persistence of Culture in Stateful Agent Societies
报告人：博士研究生：吴越
内 容：
Cultures often outlive the environments that formed them, as Chinatowns around the world show. Yet what carries a culture forward, and whether all cultures are carried in the same way, remains unclear, because in people history happens only once.
We developed an experimental paradigm in stateful agent societies, where agents driven by large language models carry their own histories from season to season: exchanges with particular others, memories of events and their interpretations. Taking rice and wheat farming, long linked to collectivism and individualism, as a test case, we let identical agents form cultures, moved them to the other ecology, and erased or rewrote parts of their histories.
Each ecology formed its own culture: rice farming produced loyalty to familiar partners and wheat farming an even-handed reserve, leaving social ties on rice land and self-focused interpretations on wheat land. Both cultures outlived their ecology through history, but through different histories: removing social ties dissolved rice-formed loyalty, whereas removing agents’ interpretations of their own experience dissolved wheat-formed reserve. Agents formed by one ecology also went on to shape the social world around them: rice-formed migrants kept helping their companions where help no longer raised harvests, wheat-formed migrants held back where it did and met reserve in return, and newcomers took on their village’s culture.
In these societies, what carries a culture forward is its history, and different cultures are carried by different histories: collectivism by relationships with particular others, individualism by each agent’s own interpretations of experience. Stateful agent societies make history an experimental variable in the study of culture.
来源：刘嘉课题组
排版：杨蓝瑜
责编：牛政旸
审核：伍珍
