Cultural psychology
Chapter 2
Culture and human nature

Is culture unique to humans?

Humans aren’t unique in their capability to learn information from other members of their species through social transmission. Even whales and pigeons do this. Some forms of cultural learning are evident across a broad swath of the animal kingdom.

Cultural learning

Humans are not unique in being able to engage in cultural leaning. But, humans seem to stand out in the extent of their cultural learning skills. Many aspects of human cultures are shared by nearly every member of the culture, this is not the case in other species. Humans also seem to be unique in whom they chose to imitate. We have a prestige bias, we are especially concerned with detecting who has prestige and then try to imitate what these individuals are doing.

Imitating prestigious others is a very effective way of cultural learning. Individuals are more likely to learn successfully if they target those people who are especially talented.

Because it is not clear what the critical behaviours of success are, individuals would fare best by having a general intimation mechanisms, by which they are attracted to prestigious individuals, whom they observe and try to imitate, regardless of what they are doing.

Humans’ unusually sophisticated cultural learning skills further rests on two key capacities. 1) The ability to consider the perspective of others 2) The ability to communicate with language

Theory of mind

A theory of mind means that people understand that others have minds that are different from their own, and thus that other people have perspectives and intentions that are different from their own. This is evident across all cultures, and it appears to develop at a fairly similar rate across cultures.

Such a theory of mind is not evident in most other species, and even in chimpanzees the evidence is mixed.

Human abilities and motivation to imagine the perspectives and intentions with others are far superior to those of chimps and other animals.

If individuals are able and motivated to undertint the intentions of others, then this provides an important step in being able to fruitfully engage in cultural learning. We are able to internalize another’s goals and reproduce them. In imitative learning, the learner internalizes something of the model’s goals and behavioural strategies. The learner is copying precisely what it thinks the model is trying to do.

In emulative learning, the learning is focused on the environmental events that are involved, how the use of one object could potentially effect changes in the state of the environment. This does not require imitating a model’s behavioural strategies. The learner is focusing on the event that happen around the model, rather than what the model intents to accomplish. This is a very smart way of learning, but does not allow for cultural information to accumulate.

Language facilitates cultural learning

Being able to communicate with others is enormously important for conveying cultural information. Language allows ideas to be communicated without having to be visually demonstrated. Through language people can manipulate the thoughts in other’s minds. It is integral to human cultural learning. Cultural ideas are most successfully transmitted through language.

Although some species have some features of language, non have the rich abilities of humans.

Humans in all cultures have complex grammar and syntax, and rich vocabularies.

Human learning is cumulative.

Cumulative cultural evolution

After an initial idea is learned from others, it can then be modified and improved upon by other individuals. The cultural information grows in complexity, and often in utility, over time. This is the ratchet effect.

To have a cumulative cultural evolution, you need creative invention and reliable and faithful social transmission. The newly invented tool or practice needs to be replicated accurately enough that others have a solid foundation upon which to build any future innovations. This requires accurate imitative learning an sophisticated communication.

The reason that cultural accumulation has been increasing at  a progressively rapid pace is that the human population continues to grow, and people have been becoming more and more interconnected. In that case, there is always a talented model to copy from. There will be more innovations that come from a larger group than from a smaller group, so a larger group will be more likely to have at least one person stumble upon a good idea.

It’s not just the size of a group that matters, it is also crucial who connected the members of the group are. Culture evolves faster in larger groups that are well connected.

In addition to the physical characteristics of our environment, humans are a cultural species that exists within worlds consisting of cultural information that has accumulated over history: cultural worlds.

Why are humans adapt at cultural learning?

You and your big brain

The high-fidelity cultural learning and sophisticated language skills that are uniquely possessed by humans would seem to depend on considerable cognitive resources. The size of our brain is relevant for understanding our skills of cultural learning.

The size of our brain costs enormous amounts of energy.

Humans versus chimpanzees

It was necessary for our bodies to change in other ways to accommodate the very large energy intake of our massive brains. We have less muscle mass than other primates. And our guts are really short. We cook food and so digest some food outside our body.

What is the evolutionary advantage of a large brain?

One theory is that primates got their large brain because of their diet of fruit. Primates that remembered where ripe fruit was, had bigger chances of survival. There is no support for this theory.

Another theory states that primates had to require a bit of ingenuity to access fruit. There is no support for this theory either.

A third theory to account for primate’s big brains is the complexity of their social worlds. To function well in a highly social community, one must be able to outmaneuver others within it, which requires attending to a highly complex series of relations. It might be the great cognitive demands inherent in social living that led to the evolution of the large primate brains. This is the social brain hypothesis. This is supported by science.

Humans appear to have evolved the cognitive capacities to maintain relationships of around 150 people, as this is the group size that they appeared to live in in ancestral environments.

Human brains are for learning from each other

It appears that there are only some kinds of tasks where we have a clear edge on our primate cousins. We have a difference in an ability to learn from others. Being able to learning so well from others, we’re in a position to build upon the innovations of others.

The primary way that humans differ from other primates is in terms of their ability to learn from others. Culture and the biology of the human brain are inextricably bound.