The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
... The final form of reasoning to discuss is an inherently social form or learning. Humans are experts at harnessing the knowledge of others by paying attention to what others do and copying them (Henrich 2015;Tankard & Paluck 2016;Bicchieri 2017;Kelly & Davis 2018). Of course, conformity can be motivated merely by a desire to maintain group affiliation or to avoid standing out from the crowd (compare Schwitzgebel 2019), but it can also be driven by a desire to form accurate beliefs (Cialdini & Goldstein 2004). ...
... We are also influenced by the behavior of group members whom we regard as especially skilled or prestigious (Henrich 2015). One landmark field study demonstrated how popular teenagers can reduce bullying through their social influence (Paluck and Shepherd 2012). ...
Can reasoning improve moral judgments and lead to moral progress? Pessimistic answers to this question are often based on caricatures of reasoning, weak scientific evidence, and flawed interpretations of solid evidence. In support of optimism, we discuss three forms of moral reasoning (principle reasoning, consistency reasoning, and social proof) that can spur progressive changes in attitudes and behavior on a variety of issues, such as charitable giving, gay rights, and meat consumption. We conclude that moral reasoning, particularly when embedded in social networks with mutual trust and respect, is integral to moral progress. Word count: 6,957 (8,782 w/references)
... The theory posits that natural selection has shaped humans to internalize norms, as such internalization decreases the costs related to information collection, processing, and decision-making, which are essential for ensuring cooperation [31,34]. However, this process of internalization also reduces behavioral flexibility, making it challenging for individuals to alter deeply ingrained norms [12,34,66]. For example, individuals frequently overestimate the difficulty of transitioning to a novel norm, with shifts occurring smoothly only in environments that provide effective feedback [35]. ...
... Our finding suggests that the collectivist culture, compared to the individualistic culture, fosters relatively more consistent internal values for ingroup norms across the lifespan. Consistent with cultural evolution theory [48,66], this trajectory suggests that individuals increasingly adopt their culture's established norms and values with age. In the Chinese context-characterized by collectivism [68][69][70][71]-this trend indicates that older individuals, after prolonged exposure to social feedback, internalize norms favoring ingroup members more deeply. ...
Altruistic punishment is key to establishing cooperation and maintaining social order, yet its developmental trends across cultures remain unclear. Using computational reinforcement learning models, we provided the first evidence of how social feedback dynamically influences group-biased altruistic punishment across cultures and the lifespan. Study 1 (n = 371) found that Chinese participants exhibited higher learning rates than Americans when socially incentivized to punish unfair allocations. Additionally, Chinese adults showed slower learning and less exploration when punishing ingroups than outgroups, a pattern absent in American counterparts, potentially reflecting a tendency towards ingroup favoritism that may contribute to reinforcing collectivist values. Study 2 (n = 430, aged 12–52) further showed that such ingroup favoritism develops with age. Chinese participants’ learning rates for ingroup punishment decreased from adolescence into adulthood, while outgroup rates stayed constant, implying a process of cultural learning. Our findings highlight cultural and age-related variations in altruistic punishment learning, with implications for social reinforcement learning and culturally sensitive educational practices promoting fairness and altruism.
... And those who claim to be thinking for themselves and doing their own research may end up deferring without realizing it, often to untrustworthy sources (Meyer et al., 2021). Humans are adept social learners who use a variety of heuristics to identify trustworthy sources of testimonial knowledge (Henrich, 2016). Among them is the tendency to conform to the majority (Muthukrishna et al., 2016). ...
... Looking back further in human history, the rise of sedentary agriculture enabled specialization, divided labor, and increased overall economic output. It also led to massive increases in inequality (Henrich, 2016). Looking back even further, arguably the first and most robust division of labor in human history has been on the basis of gender or sex; indeed, there are no documented cases of stable human societies that do not have a gendered division of labor (O'Connor, 2019). ...
Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by John Maynard Keynes, among others. More recently, philosophers have drawn analogies to Mandeville’s ideas in the domains of epistemology and morality, arguing that traits that are typically understood as epistemic or moral vices (e.g. closed-mindedness, vindictiveness) can lead to beneficial outcomes for the groups in which individuals cooperate, deliberate, and decide, for instance by propitiously dividing the cognitive labor involved in critical inquiry and introducing transient diversity. We argue that mandevillian virtues have a negative counterpart, mandevillian vices, which are traits that are beneficial to or admirable in their individual possessor, but are or can be systematically detrimental to the group to which that individual belongs. Whilst virtue ethics and epistemology prescribe character traits that are good for every moral and epistemic agent, and ideally across all situations, mandevillian virtues show that group dynamics can complicate this picture. In this paper, we provide a unifying explanation of the main mechanism responsible for mandevillian traits in general and motivate the case for the opposite of mandevillian virtues, namely mandevillian vices.
... The modern theory of gene-culture coevolution and group selection also stresses the importance of taboo in primitive societies and also organized religion of so-called moralizing gods in the development of modern civilization (Henrich, 2015). It is not at all clear that we can shed off this historical heritage and replace it with pure rational deliberation without the serious harm to the well-being of the human race. ...
This paper reviews the history of the dual-mode information processing idea in philosophy , psychology, and cognitive science. It tracks how the concept that human thinking works through two separate but interconnected systems has developed from ancient times to now. The review looks at early philosophical ideas that suggested two processes in human thought. It points out Plato's separation of reason and appetite , and Aristotle's division of the soul into rational and irrational parts. Moving to modern times, the paper discusses how dual-process theories emerged in 20th-century psychology. It covers William James's ideas of associative and true reasoning , and Freud's theories of conscious and unconscious mental processes. The review then focuses on formal dual-process theories in cognitive and moral psychology from the 1970s onwards. During this time frame, researchers began to systematically study and test these theories. By following this historical path, the paper aims to show how the idea of dual-mode information processing has grown and become important in our understanding of human thinking across different fields and time periods.
... Norms are produced by mindshaping processes that are the critical mechanism explaining human ecological dominance (Henrich, 2015). These norms are exogenous features of the contexts in which individual economic agents encounter one another as traders and bargainers. ...
Most social scientists agree that informal norms constrain available equilibria in most human interactions. However, they do not agree on how to model them: economists often make them derivative of individual preferences, while a broader tradition in social theory understands them as exogenous social facts. Non-cooperative game theory more naturally accommodates the economists’ approach. However, attention is increasingly attracted to recent work by economists who appreciate that the broader understanding may be important for full empirical adequacy. We focus on how game theorists might track this emerging shift. Extending Stirling’s previously developed Conditional Game Theory, we model macrostructural processes of norm evolution through social influence diffusion in a way that relies on no exotic solution concepts, which in turn allows norms as social facts and norms as expressions of preferences to be modeled as evaluable complements, by analogy to the complementarity of cooperative and non-cooperative game solutions under the Nash program. The result can be understood as a way of specifying mutual constraints between economic models in which normative attitudes are exogenous, and sociological models that represent such attitudes as endogenous under power relationships and ontologies of social roles.
... This paper will argue that additional, generic dimensions in curriculums that conserve disciplinary detail are unlikely to drive pedagogical reform. From the long perspective of human cultural evolution (Henrich, 2017), conservative curriculums advantage successive generations by sparing them the 'cognitive labour' of rediscovering knowledge 'ex-nihilo' (Talbot, 2023, p. 637). As societies evolve, curriculums adapt by capturing and redefining their epistemic activity (Goodson, 2014;Green, 2017;Yates & Grumet, 2011;Young, 2014). ...
This paper analyses five junior secondary curriculums for their emphases on metacognition. Metacognition is an emergent skill that prepares students for their inscrutable futures, where they will need to apply their knowledge strategically to complex contexts, guided by self-knowledge. Its development requires experiential pedagogies that introduce problematic knowledge, and it is difficult to measure. English, humanities, mathematics and science curriculums for students aged between 11–16 years were coded using a qualitative, deductive approach. Semantic information was ascribed to three epistemic and seven cognitive or metacognitive themes, and code totals compared for their relative emphases. All five curriculums provided pathways that could support metacognitive development, but only two, the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC), explicitly recommended strategies likely to provoke the dispositions of teachers towards engaging students in complex, problematic tasks. Code totals revealed curriculum tightness. Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) courses provided the greatest number of codes, but the Common Core State Standards (CC) and the Australian Curriculum (version 9) (ACv9), were similarly detailed, with up to three times as many cognitive and metacognitive references as the NZC and MYP. Although all the curriculums claimed to develop thinking skills, the three that used mandatory external assessment or benchmarking tests (CAIE, ACv9 and CC) did not offer mechanisms likely to build teacher capacity to engage their students in tasks that had intrinsic educational benefit.
Integral to the fabric of human technology, knots have shaped survival strategies since their first invention. As the ties that bind, their evolution and diversity have afforded human cultural change and expression. This study examines knotting traditions over time and space. We analyse a sample of 338 knots from 86 ethnographically or archaeologically documented societies over 12 millennia. Utilizing a novel approach that combines knot theory with computational string matching, we show that knotted structures can be precisely represented and compared across cultures. This methodology reveals a staple set of knots that occur cross-culturally, and our analysis offers insights into their cultural transmission and the reasons behind their ubiquity. We discuss knots in the context of cultural evolution, illustrating how the ethnographic and archaeological records suggest considerable know-how in knot-tying across societies spanning from the deep past to contemporary times. The study also highlights the potential of this methodology to extend beyond knots, proposing its applicability to a broader range of string and fibre technologies.
What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies ( N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020–2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3–18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non‐compliance (Study 2, 4–10 years), predict that other children will be more likely to exploit loopholes when goals conflict (Study 3, 5–10 years), and are increasingly able to generate loopholes themselves (Study 4, 5–10 years). This work provides new insights on how children navigate the gray area between compliance and defiance and the development of loophole behavior across early and middle childhood.
Many accounts of the evolutionary origins of rule-following (or normative guidance) argue that rules and norms emerged out of the demands of cooperation in early human societies. This paper argues that this cooperation story is misguided because of the underlying telic or functional framework it relies on in explaining the emergence of normative agency. The fundamental philosophical claim here is that teleology does not entail normativity. So normative guidance does not follow from any telic/functional explanation. I consider a range of possible responses from advocates of the cooperation story, including a defence of the shared intentionality approach, and argue that they fall short. I suggest that a deontic rational structure (instead of a telic or functional one) better accounts for normative guidance. In place of cooperation, I put forward the notion of participation as a more viable alternative that captures this deontic structure. Participation is said to foreground joint commitment (in lieu of joint goals) and co-regulation (instead of cooperation or coordination) as two distinctive features structuring normative agency. I end by gesturing towards interdisciplinary work that operationally unpacks this participation view from a behavioural and comparative perspective suggesting the central role of social play as a key focal point in the evolutionary emergence of normative agency.
In this chapter, heterogeneous topics specifically investigated by evolutionary medicine are briefly discussed: 9.1 Constraints determined by our phylogenetic history; 9.2 Normal physiological characteristics that become problems in a modified ecological niche; 9.3 Diseases caused by conflicting evolutionary exigencies; 9.4 Enzymatic deficiencies that are not defects; 9.5 Childbirth and newborn's first months of life.
In many domains, learning from others is crucial for leveraging cumulative cultural knowledge, which encapsulates the efforts of successive generations of innovators. However, anecdotal and experimental evidence suggests that reliance on social information can reduce the exploration of the problem space. Here, we experimentally investigate the extent to which cultural transmission fosters the persistence of arbitrary solutions in a context where participants are incentivized to improve a physical system across multiple trials. Participants were exposed to various theories about the system, ranging from accurate to misleading. Our findings indicate that even under conditions conducive to exploration, the transmission of cultural knowledge canalizes learners’ focus, limiting their consideration of alternative solutions. This effect was observed in both the theories produced and the solutions attempted by participants, irrespective of the accuracy of the provided theories. These results challenge the notion that arbitrary solutions persist only when they are efficient or intuitive and underscore the significant role of cultural transmission in shaping human knowledge and technologies.
Humans often learn preferentially from ingroup members who share a social identity affiliation, while ignoring or rejecting information when it comes from someone perceived to be from an outgroup. This sort of bias has well-known negative consequences – exacerbating cultural divides, polarization, and conflict – while reducing the information available to learners. Why does it persist? Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that similarity-biased social learning (also called parochial social learning) is adaptive when (1) individual learning is error-prone and (2) sufficient diversity inhibits the efficacy of social learning that ignores identity signals, as long as (3) those signals are sufficiently reliable indicators of adaptive behaviour. We further show that our results are robust to considerations of other social learning strategies, focusing on conformist and pay-off-biased transmission. We conclude by discussing the consequences of our analyses for understanding diversity in the modern world.
Some ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, are complex symbolic structures. Mastering them requires specialization, and because we are all amateurs in almost all symbolically rich domains, most people are not ideologically sophisticated. Instead, they reason about politics in a maturationally natural way, via friend-foe representations and inferences based on those representations (for example, friends of foes are foes). However, even complex ideologies are much simpler than the political, economic, and social systems that they are supposed to represent. Hence, all ideologies are inaccurate to varying degrees. More subtly, all are incomplete in various ways; in particular, they fail to anticipate some crucial events (for example, global warming), which leads to unanticipated value trade-offs and strategic conundrums. Ideologists sometimes adapt to incompleteness via recombinant innovation, producing hybrid ideologies (for example, ecosocialism). In turn, this tends to produce inconsistencies between new and old parts of an ideology. Thus, inaccuracy, incompleteness, and inconsistency are not pathologies of political belief systems. They are the inevitable result of ideologists grappling with a reality that is far more complex than their symbolic constructions can be. Therefore, evaluations of ideologies that identify errors, incompleteness, or inconsistency at a single point in time are often unenlightening. Following Imre Lakatos, evaluations should focus on how a sequence of ideologies—an ideological tradition—evolves.
Association football (soccer) is the world’s most popular sport. Transculturally, fans invest significant resources following their teams, suggesting underlying psychological universals with evolutionary origins. Although evolutionary science can help illuminate the ultimate causes of human behaviour, there have been limited modern evolutionary perspectives on football fandom. In this paper, we consider evolutionary perspectives on football fandom from a behavioural neuroscientific standpoint. We discuss how the appeal of football may arise through the low-scoring and highly variable outcomes of games; we relate this to the neuroscience of reward prediction errors and motivation. We highlight recent research on the psychobiological responses to ritual, including endorphin release, which may reduce anxiety and facilitate group bonding. We discuss the prosocial and anxiety-sublimating effects of the matchday ritual and argue that football may be a special case whereby ritual behaviour does have a small effect on the outcome of interest. We discuss the psychology of ingroup and outgroup effects of fandom and argue that, although resource scarcity can sometimes lead to aggression, that larger inter-group effects can be positive. We comment on the socioemotional developmental aspects of football fandom, and note how group identification may lead to displays of sacrifice. We finish with a discussion of whether, in the era of social prescribing, football could be seen as a psychiatrist’s tool. We conclude with suggestions on how the positive aspects of football can be emphasised through evolutionary perspectives, and how future research on football fandom may inform evolutionary understanding of humans writ large.
The empirical study of the arts would greatly benefit from truly interdisciplinary research. The diverse epistemic perspectives of the main disciplines concerned with researching the artistic experience (humanities, psychology, natural sciences) pose, however, a challenge to their collaboration. Rather than starting from a conceptual definition of art, we take a theoretical, cognitive-semiotic stance, analyzing art as a recursive imaginative sense-making process. This provides us with a clear picture of the multilayered structure of the artistic. As it acknowledges the innate, the learned, and the semiotic dimensions that together are constitutive of the artistic experience, the Cumulative Model for Empirical Research in the Arts, although it does not offer a practical experimental guide, provides a comprehensive theory-based framework that can support cooperation across disciplines in the research of the arts.
Engaging in uncommitted sexual relationships increases the risk of pathogen transmission through close contact with novel partners. As such, greater disease avoidance tendencies may be associated with lower sociosexuality. Across three studies, we examined this proposition. In Studies 1a and 1b, we cross-sectionally assessed the associations between individual differences in disease avoidance (i.e., germ aversion, perceived infectability) and sociosexuality dimensions (i.e., behavior, attitude, desire). Greater germ aversion was significantly associated with more restricted sociosexuality across all three dimensions and replicated in both samples. Perceived infectibility was associated with more unrestricted sociosexual attitude and desire, but only in Study 1a. In Study 2, we tested whether sociosexuality levels changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants reported more restricted sociosexuality levels during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels, where a decrease was especially seen in sociosexual desire. Further, this decrease in sociosexual desire was predicted by pre-pandemic germ aversion levels. Overall, the findings indicate that disease avoidance tendencies (i.e., germ aversion) and real-life disease threat are associated with lower tendency to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships. Further research is needed to understand the causal relation of these two constructs, which may help in developing interventions and campaigns to support better sexual health.
Paleolithic archaeologists study regional variation among assemblages of stone tools in order to delineate cultural boundaries and reconstruct mechanisms of cultural transmission in the deep past. Structured population models are especially suited to aid in this endeavor, for they teach us how cultural evolutionary forces—copying error, intergroup transmission, drift, and selection imposed by functional constraints or biased cultural transmission—affect regional cultural variation. We use an agent-based model to address how copying error, intergroup transmission, and time-averaging affect the degree to which regional archaeological assemblages differ at a selectively neutral discrete trait passed from “experienced” to “naïve” individuals via one of four mechanisms of cultural transmission in a structured population of toolmakers. The results of our simulation experiment illustrate why researchers who use time-averaged archaeological data to identify past cultural boundaries or infer mechanisms of cultural transmission should be more mindful of the nature of the cultural trait(s) available for study. In light of our results, we discuss seven questions archaeologists ought to address before attempting to infer cultural boundaries or cultural transmission mechanisms from between-assemblage variation.
Although the theoretical foundations of the modern field of cultural evolution have been in place for over 50 y, laboratory experiments specifically designed to test cultural evolutionary theory have only existed for the last two decades. Here, we review the main experimental designs used in the field of cultural evolution, as well as major findings related to the generation of cultural variation, content- and model-based biases, cumulative cultural evolution, and nonhuman culture. We then identify methodological advances that demonstrate the iterative improvement of cultural evolution experimental methods. Finally, we focus on one common critique of cultural evolution experiments, the appropriate individual learning control condition needed to demonstrate cumulative culture, and present an original experimental investigation relevant to this critique. Participants completed a combinatorial innovation task allowing for cumulative improvement over time in one of four commonly used experimental designs/conditions: social learners in chains, social learners in groups, individual learners experiencing an extended session lasting the same accumulated time as an entire chain or group, and individual learners experiencing repeated sessions adding up to the same total time. We found that repeated individual learning resulted in superior performance to any other condition. We discuss these findings in light of the relevance of the specific criticism of previous experimental studies that purport to have demonstrated cumulative culture. We also use our findings to discuss the broad trade-offs that participants face when learning individually and socially in different contexts, including variable acquisition costs, redundancy of effort in groups, and cognitive and motivational fatigue.
This article examines how three types of experience—personal, related others, and unrelated others—influence decision-making. We present the complexities and nuances in using these experiential sources to suggest that personal experience is preferred to the other two sources. We discuss the implications of this preference for decision-making processes, especially in contexts involving transformative outcomes. To conclude, we discuss how people rely on other experiential sources when their preferred source is limited.
Polarization poses a critical threat to the stability of nations around the world, as it impacts climate change, populism, democracy, and global health. This perspective examines the conceptual understanding, measurement challenges, and potential interventions for polarization. Our analysis highlights the distinction and interactions between the individual and collective levels of polarization, conceptually, methodologically, and in terms of interventions. We conclude by pointing out future directions for understanding polarization and highlighting the interrelations between polarization and other social phenomena.
The free energy principle is a formal theory of adaptive self-organising systems that emerged from statistical thermodynamics, machine learning and theoretical neuroscience and has since been translated into biologically plausible ‘process theories’ of cognition and behaviour, which fall under the banner of ‘active inference’. Despite the promise this theory holds for theorising, research and practical applications in psychology and psychiatry, its impact on these disciplines has only now begun to bear fruit. The aim of this treatment is to consider the extent to which active inference has informed theoretical progress in psychology, before exploring its contributions to our understanding and treatment of psychopathology. Despite facing persistent translational obstacles, progress suggests that active inference has the potential to become a new paradigm that promises to unite psychology’s subdisciplines, while readily incorporating the traditionally competing paradigms of evolutionary and developmental psychology. To date, however, progress towards this end has been slow. Meanwhile, the main outstanding question is whether this theory will make a positive difference through applications in clinical psychology, and its sister discipline of psychiatry.
Behaviour change has great potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, helping to prevent dangerous global warming. Some of the most impactful changes are: flying less, eating less meat, driving electric cars, improving home energy efficiency, increased use of public transport and active travel. However, these choices have proved elusive at scale and are rarely encouraged or modelled by high-status individuals (“leaders”), despite established knowledge about the influence of leaders as role models. Applying theories of embodied leadership and credibility enhancing displays, our novel pre-registered survey experiment (n = 1267) reveals that visible leading by example from politicians and celebrities significantly increases the willingness of members of the UK public to make these high-impact low-carbon choices. In addition, leading by example greatly increases perceptions of leader credibility, trustworthiness, competence, and favourability. We find no significant effects of leading by example on people’s wider perceptions of climate change, but a strong “appetite for leadership” among the public is revealed. In light of these findings, we discuss how embodied leadership by way of visible low-carbon behaviour from leaders may provide a crucial “missing link” for climate change mitigation.
According to a broad historical and contemporary consensus, ideology resides in the mind, as a sort of belief system gone wrong. Recently, however, a minority view has challenged this cognitivist consensus by highlighting ideology’s social function. This group of authors, including Rahel Jaeggi, Karen Ng, Robin Celikates, and Sally Haslanger, underline the importance of analyzing ideology through the lens of our social practices. We think these challengers move the conversation about ideology in the right direction, but their views still suffer from some weaknesses – weaknesses that we think an existential-phenomenological account of ideology can overcome. We develop such an account here. We conceive of ideology as a set of modes of being-with that attack our normative competence by placing us under unwarranted normative pressure, changing our normative stance to benefit some political group. We offer a four-fold account of normative competence and illustrate how ideology, understood in our terms, attacks it. Finally, we show that our approach shares the strengths but not the weaknesses of the minority view.
Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives for self-preservation, dominance and resource accumulation that are typical of evolved creatures. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not compelling as it stands. Evolutionary processes, as we point out, can be more or less Darwinian along a number of dimensions. Making use of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s framework of Darwinian spaces, we argue that the more evolution is top-down, directed and driven by intelligent agency, the less paradigmatically Darwinian it becomes. We then apply the concept of “domestication” to AI evolution, which, although theoretically satisfying the minimal definition of natural selection, is channeled through the minds of fore-sighted and intelligent agents, based on selection criteria desirable to them (which could be traits like docility, obedience and non-aggression). In the presence of such intelligent planning, it is not clear that selection of AIs, even selection in a competitive and ruthless market environment, will end up favoring “selfish” traits. In the end, however, we do agree with Hendrycks’ conditionally: If superintelligent AIs end up “going feral” and competing in a truly Darwinian fashion, reproducing autonomously and without human supervision, this could pose a grave danger to human societies.
The target of this chapter is cultural differences in thinking. Westerners think in a linear way whereas Easterners think dialectically. Three explanations have been proposed for the cultural differences in thinking. The first is based on the framework of between individualist (in the West) and collectivist (in the East) cultures. The second is based on Chinese philosophy (Taoism, Buddhism, etc.), which is contrasted with ancient Greek philosophy. The third is based on the distinction between Westerners’ low-context culture and Easterners’ high-context culture. The third explanation can be developed to a socio-ecological theory in the sense that a low-context culture is likely to be nourished by multicultural environments. The socio-ecological explanation can be in the frame of ‘big history’ approach which describes how contemporary cultural diversity has been achieved, although it is criticized by some institutionalists.
Objectives
This study investigates the energetic costs associated with Oldowan‐style flake production and how skill differences influence these costs.
Materials and Methods
Nine adult participants, including novice and expert toolmakers, underwent a 2‐h experimental session where we measured energy expenditure and flaking outcomes. We measured body mass (kg), percent body fat, and fat‐free mass (kg) and used open‐circuit indirect calorimetry to quantify energy expenditure. The lithic analysis used standard linear and mass measurements on the resulting cores and flakes. Qualitative observations from the video recordings provide insight into the subject's body positions and hand grips.
Results
Results reveal significant differences in energy expenditure between novice and expert toolmakers, with experts demonstrating lower overall energy expenditure. Additionally, experts produced more flakes, reduced greater core mass per unit of energy expenditure, and exhibited distinct body positions, hand grips, and core/flake morphologies compared with novices.
Discussion
The study provides novel insights into the bio‐cultural impacts of stone toolmaking skill acquisition, suggesting that skilled performance reduces the metabolic costs of stone tool production. These findings contribute to debates surrounding the origins of human cultural capacities and highlight the importance of including energy expenditure measures in knapping experiments. Moreover, the results suggest that the presence or absence of expertise in the Paleolithic would have fundamentally altered selective pressures and the reliability of skill reproduction. This study enhances our understanding of differences in stone toolmaking skill and their implications for human energy allocation strategies during early technological evolution.
This paper argues that for humanity to deal with the intersecting, existential threats of polycrisis, broad-based narrative changes are needed to make practical and relevant eco-social (or social ecological) imaginaries and related contracts. An imaginary is how people conceive or think about the world around them and their relationship to it. Social contracts are explicit and implicit agreements about how humans structure their social institutions, including rights and obligations, privileges, benefits, and restrictions. Current imaginaries (and related contracts) are almost solely human-centric, while the shift argued for here is towards eco-social imaginaries, in which both humans and nature are granted rights to flourish. Such new imaginaries have the potential to shift ideas about humans as actors in the world towards life-centric eco-social understandings in which human beings are seen as part of and interdependent with nature, and develop economies and societies oriented towards wellbeing for both humans and nature. While historically social imaginaries and their related social contracts have been human-centric, more ecologically centric imaginaries have been emerging for several decades, and in the early 2020s, as this paper documents, have now begun to become explicit. This paper identifies seven recent efforts to define and make explicit the broad parameters of such eco-social imaginaries that might be widely deployed to begin the difficult and long-term process of systemic change needed to achieve flourishing for humans and nature.
Norms play a crucial role in governing human societies. From an early age, humans possess an innate understanding of norms, recognizing certain behaviours, contexts, and roles as being governed by them. The evolution of normativity has been linked to its contribution to the promotion of cooperation in large groups and is intertwined with the development of joint intentionality. However, there is no evolutionary consensus on what normatively differentiated our hominin ancestors from the phylogenetic lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos. Here we propose that the development of teaching through a process of evaluative feedback between parent and offspring functioned as a prerequisite for the later development of normativity. Parents approve or disapprove of offspring’s behaviours based on their own learned knowledge of what is appropriate or inappropriate. We argue our proposition using a simple model of cultural transmission, which shows the adaptive advantage offered by these elementary forms of teaching. We show that an important part of this adaptive advantage can arise from the benefits derived from guidance about which behaviours to adopt or reject. We propose that this type of guidance has fundamental elements that characterise the normative world. We complete our argument by reviewing several studies that examine the emergence of normativity in young children without prior exposure to a normative framework with respect to the behaviours under analysis. We suggest that this normativity is best interpreted as manifestations of teaching among young children rather than as norm recognition among early normative children.
This paper studies the origins and function of customs and norms that intend to keep women from being promiscuous. Using large-scale survey data from more than 100 countries, I test the anthropological theory that a particular form of preindustrial subsistence – pastoralism – favored the adoption of such customs and norms. Pastoralism was characterized by frequent and often extended periods of male absence from the settlement, implying difficulties in monitoring women’s behavior and larger incentives to imposing restrictions on women’s promiscuity. The paper shows that women from historically more pastoral societies (i) are subject to stronger anti-abortion attitudes; (ii) aremore likely to have undergone infibulation, the most invasive form of female genital cutting; (iii) are more restricted in their freedom of mobility; and (iv) adhere to more restrictive norms about women’s promiscuity. At the historical society level, pastoralism predicts patrilocality, the custom of living close to the husband’s family after marriage, allowing them to monitor the bride. Instrumental variable estimations that make use of the ecological determinants of pastoralism support a causal interpretation of the results. I also provide evidence that the mechanism behind these patterns is male absence, rather than male dominance, per se, or historical economic development.
People exhibit more risk-prone behaviors when together with peers than when in private. The interplay of social context effects and other variables that alter human risk preferences (i.e., age, sex, or culture) remains poorly understood. Here, we explored risk preferences among Namibian Hai||om and Ovambo children ( N = 144; Age Range = 6–10 years). Participants chose between risky and safe options in private or during peer presence. In a third condition, children collaborated with peers before their risk preferences were assessed in those peers’ presence. Children from both societies were risk-averse, but Hai||om children showed greater risk aversion than their Ovambo counterparts. Across cultures and ages, boys were less averse to risks than girls. This effect was most pronounced during peer presence, whereas collaboration did not additionally affect risk preferences. These results suggest a dynamic interplay of individual, social, and cultural factors shaping children’s risk preferences.
Research inspired by collective action theory has provoked a rethinking of premodern governance, including state formation. We briefly summarize key elements of this theoretical turn, first, by demonstrating that, as predicted by the existing theory, political collective action is enhanced when the provision of good government motivates taxpayer compliance. Beyond that key process, our cross-cultural comparative investigation identified a suite of corollary social and cultural factors, including civic ritual, that, side-by-side with good government, served to undergird the institution of political collective action. We investigate, in particular, policies and practices that fostered the transformation of what had been a dominated and socially fragmented subaltern into a politically engaged and conditionally compliant citizenry. We discuss this process in relation to administrative policies and practices and in relation to evidence we found for directed cultural change purposed to enhance consensus and forbearance in the face of social divisiveness and political inequality.
Although no one disputes that the transmission of culture depends on social learning, a capacity that has enabled humans, unlike other animals, to modify cultural practices across generations, this review argues that cultural change can also be evoked by environmental events leading to an alteration in the configuration of an habitual behavioural repertoire. An evoked mechanism allows latent or normally suppressed behaviour to emerge. Cannibalism and warfare are put forward as examples. Evoked mechanisms have largely been ignored by one of the few attempts to reconcile biology and culture, namely cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). This review endorses CCE's aim of developing a biocultural conceptual framework but criticises this model for failing to produce a credible analysis of culture into ‘units’ or ‘variants’. The critique of CCE is situated within a discussion of the long-standing separation within academia of science and arts disciplines, each focusing at different levels of analysis and with different aims. It is suggested that the main obstacle to developing a biocultural framework can be attributed to an incompatibility between nomothetic and idiographic research methods, the former being typical of the biological sciences, the latter of the arts. A successful biocultural conceptual framework would therefore have to accommodate the particular and the general. It is suggested that progress in this direction would be made if agreement could be reached on ways of observing or inferring behaviours rather than pursuing an analysis in terms of hypothetical constructs such as mental representations or units of ‘cultural information’.
In this text we will focus on the interpretation of law, specifically on the question of how the meaning of legal texts is created and recreated through judicial interpretation of law. To be able to explain how this happens, we will use the philosophy of language, in particular the philosophy of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars and Robert B. Brandom. In their view, language is not a tool that serves primarily and exclusively to describe a world that exists independently of us and our attitudes, but through language we co-create the world we live in. Many of the things we perceive in the world around us are accessible to us and exist because of our language.
The cognitive and evolutionary approach to the research of religion in cultural and social anthropology has been systematically developing since the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. At the end of the 1990s, cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion began to be applied in the research of religion by a narrow group of ethnologists, religionists, and anthropologists in Slovakia. This paper aims to provide a basic overview of the fundamental concepts of cognitive and evolutionary anthropology of religion. It focuses on selected scholars whose works and ideas are considered pivotal in the development of this field. The second objective is to outline how cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion have
been reflected in ethnology and sociocultural anthropology in Slovakia.
Although acculturation psychology is extensively studied in the social sciences, research progress has slowed due to overused methodologies and theories and emerging challenges to core conceptual tenets. Here, we seek to stimulate scientific inquiry into acculturation by integrating underutilized cultural evolutionary perspectives. We propose that cultural evolutionary mechanisms, such as (anti)conformity, prestige bias, payoff bias, and vertical transmission are instrumental in understanding when, why, and how minority- and majority-group members acculturate. The direction and potency of these mechanisms are proposed to be modulated by a combination of contextual and individual factors, resulting in acculturation strategies that at the population level form “cultural evolutionary equilibria.” These equilibria in turn have consequences for the long-term, population-level dynamics of cultural evolution. We outline how our integration of perspectives can allow researchers to model the dynamics of large-scale cultural change, increasing our understanding of the complex challenges faced by today’s diverse societies.
Public Abstract
Acculturation describes the cultural and psychological changes resulting from intercultural contact. Here, we use concepts from “cultural evolution” to better understand the processes of acculturation. Cultural evolution researchers view cultural change as an evolutionary process, allowing them to borrow tools and methods from biology. Cultural evolutionary mechanisms such as conformity (copying the numerical majority), anti-conformity (copying the numerical minority), prestige bias (copying famous individuals), payoff bias (copying successful people), and vertical cultural transmission (copying your parents) can cause people to adopt elements from other cultures and/or conserve their cultural heritage. We explore how these transmission mechanisms might create distinct acculturation strategies, shaping cultural change and diversity over the long-term. This theoretical integration can pave the way for a more sophisticated understanding of the pervasive cultural shifts occurring in many ethnically diverse societies, notably by identifying conditions that empower minority-group members, often marginalized, to significantly influence the majority group and society.
Humans learn both directly, from own experience, and via social communication, from the experience of others. They also often integrate these two sources of knowledge to make predictions and choices. We hypothesized that when faced with the need to integrate communicated information into personal experience, people would represent the average of experienced exemplars with greater accuracy. In two experiments, Mturk users estimated the mean of consecutively and rapidly presented number sequences that represented bonuses ostensibly paid by different providers on a crowdsource platform. Participants who expected integrating these values with verbal information about possible change in bonuses were more accurate in extracting the means of the values compared to participants who did not have such expectation. While our study focused on socially communicated information, the observed effect may potentially extend to other forms of information integration. We suggest that expected integration of experience with additional information facilitates an abstract representation of personal experiences.
For several decades scientists and philosophers studying how the mind works have debated the issue of modularity. Their main disagreements concern the massive modularity hypothesis, according to which all (or most) of our cognitive mechanisms are modular in nature. Pietraszewski and Wertz (2022) have recently suggested that the modularity debate is based on a confusion about the levels of analysis at which the mind can be explained. This article argues that their position suffers from three major problems: (1) the argument is unsound, with untrue premises; (2) it glosses over important empirical issues; and (3) the guidelines it offers are not sufficient for avoiding future confusions. As these criticisms are developed, this article will provide a way of making sense of the modularity debate - with an eye for what really is at stake both conceptually and empirically - and , by identifying a false assumption often shared by proponents and opponents of the massive modularity hypothesis alike, it will sketch out some guidelines for moving the debate forward.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.