Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat

Understand

As we navigate our cultural environment, we learn cultural biases, like those around gender, social class, health, and body weight.

• It is unclear, however, exactly how public culture becomes private culture.
• In this paper, we provide a theoretical account of such cultural learning.
• We propose that neural word embeddings provide a parsimonious and cognitively plausible model of the representations learned from natural language.