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Benjamin Cheung

Chapter 3—Cultural Evolution

Cultural Psychology

Third Edition

Steven J. Heine

Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, you will:

Understand how a group’s ecology impacts the evolution of cultural norms

Provide evidence for how the physical environment can directly and indirectly influence a group’s cultural norms

Define proximal causes and distal causes of cultural evolution

Differentiate between proximal and distal causes of cultural evolution

Summarize Jared Diamond’s arguments from Guns, Germs, and Steel

Provide evidence for proximal and distal causes in support of Jared Diamond’s arguments

Define transmitted culture and evoked culture

Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, you will:

Differentiate between how transmitted and evoked culture emerge

Compare and contrast biological evolution vs. cultural evolution

Explain why and how some ideas spread

Discuss the ways in which cultures have been changing around the world

Explain how cultures have been changing

Discuss the ways in which cultures have been persisting around the world

Explain how cultures have persisted

Overriding Themes in This Chapter

Cultural ideas and norms don’t necessarily emerge to address universal problems— they are the result of cultural learning.

Cultures are fluid and dynamic, and, in most cases, will change over time.

How Cultural Variation Emerged

Characteristics of local ecologies have impact on cultural values and norms.

Impact is exerted in different ways:

Proximal causes vs. distal causes

Evoked culture vs. transmitted culture

How Cultural Variation Emerged

Proximal causes: Something that has direct and immediate effects

E.g. Conquistadors had guns and steel swords and armor, allowing them to quickly overcome Incans, who lacked such technology.

Distal causes: Initial differences that lead to effects over long periods of time

E.g. Fertile Crescent’s abundance of easy-to-domesticate plants and animals spread across Eurasia, allowing for development of agriculture, which provided sufficient food for people to devote time to nonfood activities such as creating tools and learning to work with steel; Americas had no such endowments.

How Cultural Variation Emerged

Evoked culture: Certain environmental conditions evoke certain responses from people.

Such responses come to comprise culture

E.g. more emphasis on physical attractiveness due to greater parasite prevalence

Transmitted culture: Cultural idea that is learned via social transmission or modeling

E.g. parents teach their children to pay attention to physical attractiveness

How Cultural Variation Emerged

Edgerton (1971) surveyed communities from different East African tribes:

Tribal affiliation trumped ecological pressures in predicting attitudes of a community.

Transmitted culture can play a more powerful role in cultural variation than evoked culture.

Tribal affiliation

(Transmitted culture)

Ecological pressures

(Evoked culture)

Ecological differences were not the only components determining the emergence of cultural variation.

Edgerton surveyed communities from different East African tribes:

Tribal affiliation trumped ecological pressures in predicting the attitudes of a community.

Transmitted culture can play a more powerful role in cultural variation than evoked culture.

How Do Cultural Ideas Spread and Evolve?

At the most basic level:

Ideas need to be passed on to others

People must retain those ideas

Cultural evolution is usually understood using biological evolution.

How Do Cultural Ideas Spread and Evolve?

Biological evolution operates through two mechanisms:

Natural selection

Sexual selection

Natural Selection

In a given population, one should see increased proportion of a trait that confers survival advantage.

Requires three conditions to be present:

Individual variability within a species for a trait

Variability associated with different survival rates

A trait that has a hereditary basis

When ecological pressures favor survival of some variant of a trait, proportion of that variant in the population increases over time.

Sexual Selection

Selection favors traits that confer reproductive advantages.

What gets sexually selected may go against what confers survival advantage.

E.g. brilliant tail feathers of a peacock may attract a lot of peahens, but they also make the peacock a much easier prey to spot and catch.

Cultural Evolution vs. Biological Evolution

Cultural evolution ≈ Biological evolution

Similarities

Some cultural ideas persist for longer than others (higher survival rates).

Some cultural ideas are more prone to being passed along to others (reproduced more).

Differences

Cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally amongst peers.

Biological evolution is limited to vertical transmission from parents to offspring.

Facilitating Spread of Ideas— Four Key Concepts

Ideas must be communicable (passed from one person to another).

Communicability may depend on factors such as simplicity, usefulness, informative value, and social desirability.

Facilitating Spread of Ideas— Four Key Concepts

Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to clustering of attitudes.

Cullum and Harton (2007) tracked attitudes of students randomly assigned to different residences.

Attitudes clustered according to residences, especially attitudes deemed more important.

New subcultures formed on the basis of ideas people regularly communicated.

Facilitating Spread of Ideas— Four Key Concepts

Ideas with emotional impact, or ones that elicit strong emotional reactions, are more likely to be communicated.

Such ideas comprise urban or contemporary legends.

People can connect with others better when experiencing similar feelings.

Facilitating Spread of Ideas— Four Key Concepts

Ideas that have a minimal number of counterintuitive components persist longer.

Such ideas violate our expectations but not too outlandishly.

Characteristic of many religious works and myths

Facilitating Spread of Ideas— Four Key Concepts

Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller (2006)

Cinderella

The Donkey Cabbage

Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, and Schaller (2006) found that the more successful Grimm Brothers tales (e.g., “Cinderella”) had two to three counterintuitive elements.

Less popular Grimm Brothers tales (e.g. “The Donkey Cabbage”) had anywhere between zero to six counterintuitive elements.

Recent Cultural Changes

Cultures have been changing and evolving in recent decades in several ways.

Increasingly interconnected

Increasingly individualistic

People increasingly intelligent

Increasingly Interconnected Cultures

Reduced costs of transportation and enhanced ease of long-distance communication are connecting cultures like never before.

Such interconnectedness has created a global culture —many large companies span national borders.

This globalization has been countered by increased tribalism—an urge to return to traditional cultures.

Increasingly Individualistic Cultures

Cultures often studied on an Individualism/Collectivism (I/S) dimension

Individualism = individuals encouraged to consider themselves as distinct from others and prioritize own personal goals over collective goals

Collectivism = individuals encouraged to place more emphasis on goals of one’s collective/ingroup

Increasingly Individualistic Cultures

Americans are less socially engaged and less civically active since the 1960s.

People in the United States have become less socially engaged and less civically active since the 1960s.

For example, people were more likely to entertain guests at home, vote, join a parent-teacher association, socialize with their neighbors, etc.

Increasingly Individualistic Cultures

Such a shift is especially noticeable comparing younger Americans with older generations of Americans.

Proposed reasons for this shift include:

More pressures of time and money

Increased suburbanization

More electronic entertainment

Living through a “transformational experience” like World War II

Increasingly Individualistic Cultures

Even looking at culture-level measures, the vocabulary that’s used in books published in the United States have been increasingly related to individualism and uniqueness.

Increasingly Individualistic Cultures

An increase in individualism in traditionally collectivistic cultures such as Japan has occurred as well (Hamamura, 2011).

Can be seen from increase in divorce rates, decrease in average family size, valuing more independence in children

Increasingly Intelligent Cultures

Longitudinal data suggests the current generation to be more intelligent, with higher IQ scores than earlier generations.

Known as “Flynn Effect”

Based on rate of IQ increase, someone scoring at cutoff for “mental retardation” now on standardized IQ test would have scored at cutoff for “gifted” a century ago.

Increasingly Intelligent Cultures

Most gains seen in Raven’s Matrices

Answer: 2

But moderate gains are also seen across a variety of different measures of intelligence.

Increasingly Intelligent Cultures

Proposed reasons for increased intelligence include:

More people receiving education than before

Increased percentage of population has bachelor’s degree

Pop culture has been increasingly more complicated

Movies and TV shows have more complicated plots; video games have become highly complex.

Increasingly Intelligent Cultures

Proposed reasons:

Education

More people are receiving education than before.

An increased percentage of the population has a bachelor’s degree. Only 27% of men born in 1890 had a high school education, with only 9% completing post secondary education. In 2012, 94% of people over 25 had a high school education, with 58% having post secondary education, and 11% achieving postgraduate degrees.

Question for Consideration

Which of these trends do you think will continue?

Persistence of Cultures

Despite some cultural practices changing over time, other cultural habits and attitudes have become entrenched across generations.

Subjective well-being

For example, subjective well-being, the feeling of how satisfied one is with one’s life, has always demonstrated very high consistency among people of the same cultural origins, despite living in different geographical regions.

Americans who are of Scandinavian descent had the highest subjective well-being, followed by those of central European descent, and followed by those of eastern European descent.

This mimics measures of subjective well-being across their heritage cultures.

Persistence of Cultures

This persistence is due to the effect of some preexisting structure.

Evolution of culture departs from, and is based on, some initial cultural state.

Such initial cultural states will limit the manner in which future cultural variation takes shape.

This persistence is due to:

The effect of some preexisting structure: culture progresses by making changes to preexisting ideas and structures, interwoven with existing beliefs and practices.

One important example is how modern economic development in African countries resulted from the constraints put upon them by the slave trade. The slave trade led to a massive reduction in population size and the fostering of distrust due to the kidnapping of Africans to be sold into slavery by European colonists and the local populous.

Persistence of Cultures

Preexisting structure

These ideas have served to greatly hamper these countries’ abilities to engage in effective economic development.

Those countries that engaged in high levels of slave export, compared to those who had low levels of slave export, have had a much lower GDP, a common measure of economic development.

Persistence of Cultures

Initial conditions

(Baltzell,1979)

Another reason for the persistence of cultures may be the initial conditions in which culture developed.

Related to culture based on some preexisting cultural state, the preexisting cultural state invariably leads us to some initial cultural state.

These initial cultural states will limit the manner in which future cultural variation takes shape.

For instance, Boston (within a historically more Puritan region), exhibits more respect for authority, and its most prestigious school, Harvard, based its curriculum on the importance of public service. This is reflective of the values of the Puritans who settled in this area.

Persistence of Culture

Pluralistic ignorance = tendency to collectively misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behaviors

Another reason why cultures persist

When everyone (incorrectly) assumes everyone else is in favor of some cultural norm, they comply with the norm, thus perpetuating the culture.

Summary

Cultural ideas can be spread in a variety of ways.

Only certain cultural ideas will likely be passed successfully within a population.

Cultures have become increasingly interconnected, individualistic, and intelligent.

Discussion

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