Humans Are Hardwired to Learn Culture: Research and Implications
Human culture stands out among animals in its complexity, variability, and cumulative nature. Children are born into cultural environments that encompass group-specific knowledge, practices, and technologies passed down and modified across generations. The processes that enable cultural acquisition and transmission are universal, yet flexible enough to accommodate the diverse cultural practices of human populations. This article explores the development and diversity of cumulative cultural learning, examining the cognitive foundations and learning processes involved, and how these processes are shaped by different environments, economies, and educational systems.
The Uniqueness of Cumulative Culture
Culture, defined as group-typical behaviors shared by a community and reliant on socially learned and transmitted information, exists in many species. However, human culture is exceptional in its variation, complexity, and cumulative quality. In just a few thousand years, human technology has progressed from stone tools to smartphones, demonstrating the rapid pace of cultural innovation.
Cumulative culture involves individuals modifying existing technologies, often adding features that improve their functions. This accumulation of solutions allows for the creation of new technologies by building upon previous innovations. Technologies and tools often become too complex for individuals to fully understand or develop independently. The invention of complex technology is possible only through cumulative cultural transmission, which entails retaining some practices, discarding others, and incrementally adding innovations.
Humans live and learn in diverse cultural environments shaped by the cumulative innovations of past generations. These environments incorporate social and technological innovations into a cultural repertoire, creating more complex bodies of socially heritable knowledge. Cumulative culture enhances individual innovation by providing a foundation of accumulated solutions that can be modified and combined.
Cognitive Foundations of Cumulative Cultural Learning
What explains the uniquely human capacities to rapidly acquire, accumulate, and build upon the discoveries of previous generations? While larger brain size and processing power are factors, they are insufficient to fully explain the variation and complexity of human culture. The exponential increase in technological and cultural complexity is a relatively recent event, without corresponding changes in neural complexity or brain size. Demographic changes, such as population size and density, are better explanations for increases in symbolic and technological complexity.
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Other factors contributing to cumulative culture include general cognitive mechanisms, language, prosociality, cooperation, morality, imitation, and teaching. Social learning is particularly critical, as comparative research indicates that nonhuman primates have limited capacity for social learning compared to human children.
Social Learning and Cultural Transmission
Human minds are complex learning systems, and the beliefs and behaviors of populations are transmitted through social learning processes. Social learning is defined as learning that is influenced by observation of or interaction with another animal or its products. Young children are skilled at mastering the beliefs and practices of their communities through social learning, supported by early-developing social cognitive capacities, including cognitive flexibility, theory of mind, norm psychology, and prosociality.
For learned behavior to be considered cultural, it must be transmitted within a group and maintain stability over time. The cognitive processes that allow children to acquire and transmit cultural knowledge and skills are universal but flexible enough to allow them to learn group-specific beliefs and behaviors. Cumulative culture requires learning processes that support the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and practices from other group members.
The cultural ratchet effect is the process by which learners accumulate, modify, and improve upon information from others. Cumulative culture also requires learning processes that support the capacity to innovate in order to respond flexibly to novel challenges and environments. Innovation requires behavioral flexibility, which is the continued interest in and acquisition of new solutions to a task, even after mastering a previous solution.
Cognitive Flexibility
Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to build upon existing behaviors by discarding previous solutions in favor of more productive or efficient ones. The development of cognitive flexibility and other executive functions underpins the abilities to make plans, solve problems, and learn new information. Cultural experience shapes cognitive flexibility.
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Theory of Mind
The ability to reason about the inner workings of our minds and the minds of others is critical to efficient social learning. Children across diverse populations reliably develop a theory of mind, which is the ability to attribute mental states to others and recognize that others' mental states can differ from one's own. While the timing of initial theory of mind development is similar across populations, the sequence of components of theory of mind reasoning can vary. Socialization of collectivism or individualism may influence the development of theory of mind reasoning.
Norm Psychology
Children have early-developing norm psychology that guides their attention to group expectations for beliefs and behavior. Several cognitive biases influence the development of norm psychology, including homophily and consensus. Young children are attentive to information about social norms or rules and actively enforce them.
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis posits that brains have been selected for their ability to store and manage information acquired through asocial or social learning. The model reveals relationships between brain size, group size, innovation, social learning, mating structures, and the length of the juvenile period. The Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis (CCBH) predicts the conditions that favor an autocatalytic take-off characteristic of human evolution.
Brains expand in response to the availability of information and calories. Information availability is affected by learning strategies, group size, mating structure, and the length of the juvenile period, which co-evolve with brain size. The model captures this co-evolution under different conditions and describes the specific conditions that can lead to a take-off in brain size. When these conditions are met, social learning may cause a body of adaptive information to accumulate over generations. This accumulating information can lead to selection for brains better at social learning and at storing and managing adaptive knowledge.
The juvenile period expands to provide more time for social learning. As biological limits on brain size are reached, increases in the complexity and amount of adaptive knowledge can take place through other avenues, such as division of information, mechanisms for increasing transmission fidelity, and further expansion of the adolescent period.
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Mirror Neurons and Learning
From their very first day on earth, babies learn by interacting with other human beings. It takes no more than a few minutes to teach a baby how to smile, stick her tongue out, or wave her hand in the air - simply by showing. Mirror neurons enable humans to spread knowledge quickly and effortlessly. This discovery provides a never-before-realized understanding of how we learn and grow. Mirror neurons prove that the basis of human comprehension stems from observing, comprehending, and imitating. By incorporating human interaction, you create a learning setting where students are able to learn from each other as they go, firing up these mirror neurons and stimulating comprehension.
The Power of Narrative
Human beings have been telling stories as long as there’s been a language to tell them in. We think in stories, remember in stories, and turn just about everything we experience into a story. Our instinct for story is a survival skill. In the days before written language, the only way to create an idea that persisted and spread was to make it durable in our minds. A story solves this problem by linking an idea to an ego. It presents a sequence of events that could happen and invites listeners to put themselves in the role of the protagonist. The better we’re able to invest our ego into that fictional protagonist, the stickier the story and the idea become. Human capability is immense; it’s the alignment of those capabilities that makes the difference between progress and defeat. And stories align like nothing else.
Humans respond most strongly to stories that follow a particular general structure: A character has a goal, which is backed by a clear motive, but is blocked by obstacles. The character must struggle to meet the goal, encountering allies and resources. Once the obstacles are overcome, a new normal is established. Our preference for this kind of pattern is so ingrained that we often alter our memory of events to make them fit it, or invent new ones from scratch. Memory is a creative act, in which we subconsciously work to put the things we’ve experienced into a resonant structure so that they stick.
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