 As indicated earlier, Sperber argues that the simple notion of copying is only rarely appropriate to explain why broadly similar cultural items propagate in a stable manner through a population. For example, when emotional states spread through communities—perhaps at times of national mourning—it is often the case that one individual’s grief is causally initiated by that of another. But the second individual does not closely imitate, or copy, the emotional state of the first, even if the second emotional state resembles—and hence is a ‘reproduction’ of—the first. Instead, a shared set of background emotional dispositions, perhaps coupled to shared norms for public behaviour, conspire to reconstruct a second emotional state that is similar to the first. Such states, which are the broadly stable outcomes of these reconstructive processes, are examples of cultural ‘attractors’.