Reply to Bentley and Ormerod: Key Considerations in Studying Cultural Abandonment By Using Baby Names

• Authors: Gaël Le Mens.
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

In their letter, Bentley and Ormerod argue that established diffusion models based on the saturation of the pool of potential adopters “explains” the adoption and abandonment pattern that we observed. As evidence for this argument, they suggest that established models fit the data well. On this basis, they claim that our finding that adoption velocity has a positive effect on abandonment is “unsurprising”. This claim is unwarranted, however, because a key assumption of saturation models such as the one Bentley and Ormerod use is inconsistent with the baby-name setting we investigated.