Psychology of Culture

Objective of the course

Understand how and why human and nonhuman animals innovate, learn in a social context, and modify culturally transmitted information, behaviour and artifacts

Cumulative cultural artifacts

Artifacts based on cumulative cultural evolution, you can use them as time machines to reconstruct the events that created these artifacts

For cumulative culture to emerge, you need two processes:

Repeated inventions and high fidelity transmission. You need to make sure that the next generation continues to do what is done before and replicate it faithfully, so they can make the next evolutions better.

Both repeated innovation and high fidelity transmission are aspects of

Society, they have to do with social learning, so they are key elements of our psychology

Classic anthropological definition of (human) culture

That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

Teaching

The idea of an “expert” trying to convey information. Break it down, modify behaviour, and adjust the level of transmission to different audiences.

Teaching-like abilities in non-human animals like meerkats

Helpers have knowledge and adjust their level of teaching-like processes to the pups as they grow up

Teaching in the context of natural selection

A teacher is incurring costs when breaking down the knowledge in front of a naive individual. In time, the expert can do it faster, but teaching means they have to do it slower. And energy, breaking down the actions takes more energy when the expert is used to doing it faster.

A technology is a physical tool, like the hand axe

Psychotechnology - the tool as something that extends your biology, as well as fits biology, and enhances it. This fits your mind, extends it, and enhances it. Literacy emerged relatively recently.

According to Mark Pagel, humans are particularly adapted to culture

As our ancestors were gradually acquiring the ability to speak, read, cooperate, and to build upon an idea, our species was gradually evolving a mind that was also becoming wired for culture. Human infants are not born with a specific culture, culture is learned. However, the mind has evolved the capacity to be prepared to acquire culture.

We are not _________ when it comes to culture

Blank slates

The standard social science view, taken to an extreme:

Would argue that we are all blank slates, our mind when we are born is a tabluar rasa and as we grow up the culture feeds us with specific information.

Humans are special animals, in that,

They are particularly prone to learn culturally transmitted information, This does not mean other animals do not have culture, but humans are special. No religion like practices exist in non-human animals, for example.

The specific content of cultural information is

Going to be acquired through culture, but the cultural capacity of us is evolutionary prepared. The fact we are wired for culture is unique.

Two problems with the anthropological definition of culture

It is not telling us a lot about the underlying psychological processes, and very human centric

Human centric idea of culture

Telling us almost nothing about what culture could be in non-human animals. We take a cross-species and cultural comparative perspective. One of the most powerful tools we have is the exploration of ancestral states of culture by tracking step-by-step changes in evolution.

Descriptive definition of culture

Emphasis on enumeration of content

Historical definition of culture

Social heritage or tradition

Normative definition of culture

Rules or way of living, ideals and behaviour

Psychological definitions of culture

Emphasis on adjustment, on culture as a problem-solving device. Emphasis on learning and emphasis on habit.

Structural definitions of culture

Emphasis on patterning or organization of culture

Genetic definitions of culture

Emphasis on culture as a product or artifact, emphasis on ideas, emphasis on symbols, genetic mutations allow new material to appear, innovations in the cultural world allows new material. Biological genetic processed that cause those mutations to continue or not.

Key features of human culture

Created / invented, socially learned, collective, integrated, manifested over long periods of time and through explicit regularities, affects people’s behaviour and interpretation of behaviour, influences social structure, decision, making practices, and communication styles.

Integrated (an emergent trait that results from a mosaic of other traits)

In emergence, in the context of group level integrated phenomena, the whole is greater than the sum of its part. The end product, culture, is greater than the sum of its parts. Beyond other elements, you need to understand how they interact with each other.

Manifested over long periods of time and through explicit regularities

Patterns, personality is powerful because it allows you to predict yourself and to predict others, culture is the same, allows you to navigate your own culture, and because it has regularities, it allows other people to predict what the culture is about. The idea that, just like personality, acts as like a filtering mechanism between you and the environment, that is how you process the world in certain ways over others.

The three Bs of creativity

Bed, bath, and bus. The idea that we are particularly creative when doing tasks we are not focusing on.

Research on social learning and culture must be important

What gives rise to modern behaviour, what are the roots of human culture, observe a lot of interest and research focused, the answers will have major implications for understanding our cultural traits

The way we do things

Five word phrase captures 4 characteristics, which, if present in a creature, qualify as culture: Do things, the way, we, the way we do things

Do things

Refers to overt acts, that is, behaviours that can be recorded, counted and measured. Action.

“The way”

Refers to the form in behaviour or artifact that is standardized or even stylized, as opposed to alternatives of other forms, or to lack of form altogether. Standardization.

“We”

Refers to collective acts or objects that are socially significant, through meaningful interactions, rather than merely individual behaviour done in parallel with others. Collectivity,

“The way we do things”

Refers to the source of a sense of identity, as our way of doing things differentiates us from the way others do things. Group identity.

A relatively consensual definition of culture in human and non-human animals

Group specific behavioural practice, prevalent among several group members, persistent over time, dependent on social means for its transmission and maintenance, cross species comparison

Universality

Everyone

Uniformity

High degree of similarity

Conformity

Social imitation: desire to do as the others do

Normatively

The way things should be done

Ethnic markers

Group identity

Social conventions

shared meanings

Language

Symbolic and synaptic communication

Teaching

Instructional learning

Perspective taking

Perceiving oneself, others, to group

History

Cumulavity

Human culture unique (?) products

Material, social, and representative

Material

Complex technologies, tools/toys, instruments, architectural styles

Tectonic material

Utilitarian, candle for lighting, plate for eating

Sociotechnical material

Non-utilitarian, Candle for formal dinner, plate for display

Ideo-technic

Non-utilitarian, votive candle, communion plate

Social

Social institutions, moral rules, norms

Representative

Beliefs (religion, rituals, ceremonies), symbolic systems (languages), information (theoretical knowledge, jokes)

The secret to our success

Biologically we are very weak and fragile, culture is defensive, we can inherit and pass on our knowledge, we don’t need physical features when we have culture, culture is a cultural universal

Integral model

“AQAL” model (all quadrants, all levels). Subjective, objective, intersubjective, interobjective, describing organizing patterns for all reality, implications, all realities are filtered through 4 irreducible perspectives/quadrants

Integral model implications

Culture, personality, consciousness, clinical psychology, spiritual psychology, etc.

All realities are filtered through 4 irreducible perspectives/quadrants along:

Interior (inside) —> exterior (outside) axis

Individual (singular) —> collective (plural) axis

These 4 perspectives/quadrants

Afford us a partial and complementary (rather than complete and contradictory) experience of reality. It is included in most languages, suggesting that they have a universal applicability to the human experience.

The upper left quadrant, the “I” perspective

Individual’s first-person singular subjective experience, valid claim: truthfulness, honesty, felt coherence, Individual experience—as felt “from the inside”

The “I” perspective, characterized by

My states of inner and experiential consciousness (bodily sensations, thoughts, soul, spirit). My goals, intentions, and beliefs. My feelings, preferences, sense of aesthetics. My cognitive awareness, emotional access, interpersonal skills, moral capacity, spiritual experience, sense of self.

Upper right quadrant, the “it” perspective

Third-person objective experience, valid claim: truth by empirical correspondence. Individual behaviour as seen “from the outside”.

The “it'“ perspective is characterized by

Scientific data, my or others’ observable, measurable and testable phenotypic traits (anatomical structures, physiological patterns, behavioural expressions) and extended phenotypes (artifacts/products)

Lower left quadrant, the “we” perspective

Inside the first-person plural, collective intersubjective experience. Valid claim: justness, mutual understanding. Cultural worldview—the group’s experience “from the inside”.

The “we” perspective, characterized by:

Shared cultural worldviews, norms, values. Shared myth of descent, history, purpose. Shared sense of belonging and solidarity. Shared linguistic meaning, philosophical positions, religious understanding.

Lower right quadrant, the “it’s” (or “their”) perspective

Outside the third-person plural/collective interobjective structures. Valid claim: functional fit. Social systems—the group’s behaviour “from the outside”.

The “it’s” (or “their”) perspective, characterized by

Shared ecological environment. Shared social, regulatory, and political systems organized by institutions and governed by rules, working processes, locations, schedules, forces of production.

What is technology? (In cultural anthropology)

Systematic use of culturally produced physical/literal tools, tool use, physical tools (e.g., acheuluean handaxe), marker, psycho-tool, ideographic/pictorial literacy, alphabetical literacy, numeracy (through use of coinage), humanity placed further demands on symbolic thought (abstraction), mathematics (arithmetic, algebraic equation, Cartesian graphing

Physical/literal tools

Objects with a techomic function. Utilitarian objects that are used for physical purposes and practical utility in the physical/material environment.

Tool use

Employment of an unattached or manipulable attached object to more efficiently alter the form, position, or condition of another object, organism, or the user itself, when the user directly manipulates the tool during or prior to use and responsible for the effective orientation of the tool;

Physical tool (handaxe)

Technology fits our biology, extends it, and enhances how it operates. We cannot (=hardly) butcher the carcass of an animal or crack big bones with our bare hands, with this tool we can.

Physical tool—bottle

We cannot carry water with our bare hands, with this tool we can

Marker

We cannot leave visible marks on a whiteboard with our bare fingers, this tool allows us to

Psycho-tool (e.g., word)

Psycho-technology fits our mind/brain, extends it, and enhances how it operates. We are not born literate (we were born linguistic). Through cultural learning, we acquired literacy as a psychotechnology Extended cognition and brain-to-brain networking (evolution of software more than hardware.

Ideographic/pictorial literacy

Clunky characters lacking versatility, harsh limits on range of thoughts conveyed, literacy was rare (only scribes; full-time job)

Alphabetical literacy

Flexible and versatile characters, increased fluency and distributed cognition, literacy more common (easier to learn)

What would be left of us without this [technology]?

Our naked psychology (back to before the “upper paleolithic transition”

Other examples of psyhco-technology

Mental, embodied, pharmacological, technological

Mental technology

Language, literacy, numeracy, metaphor, mindfulness, hypnosis, spiritual practices

Embodied technology

Fasting, cold therapy, sensory deprivation, music, chanting, breathing techniques, meditation, yoga, martial arts

Pharmacological

Nootropics, hallucinogenic drugs

Technological

Neurofeedback therapy, TES, brain implants

The very thing that makes you adaptive also makes you vulnerable

Self-destructive thoughts and behaviours, cost and benefit aspect to culture, the cognitive machinery of humans has been profoundly shaped during the course of evolution by forces (natural selection, cultural selection, shape our cognitive machinery)

The power of natural selection on our psychotechnolgy explains why humans

Are wired for culture and why human culture is a cultural universal. Grounded in the fact, we are prepared to perceive and process cultural information.

Preparedness for culture enables our

Capacity to learn as a child, many possible spoken languages, we are not born literate we are born linguistic

Capacity to learn

This can be detrimental and maladaptive

Humans (in learning) have a tendency to

Overdetect and falsely detect patterns in the world, detecting them can be helpful but in some instances it can trick us, we are vulnerable to cultural information

The power of cultural evolution explains

Our culturally influenced biases

Culturally influenced bias

Part of illusions is evolutionarily prepared, but also due to cultural influence, variation between groups

The 9 dot puzzle

Mentally break the illusory frame of the square

Psychotechnology does what to our mind/brain

Extends it and enhances how it operates. They do fit our mind/brain, but what they really do is significantly alter how it operates for better or for worse.

Humans are very “vulnerable”

To irrational beliefs

Supernatural phenomena

Superstitions, horoscopes, paranormal, telepathy, religion

Irrational beliefs

They do have positive consequences in some aspects. The same cognitive root, supernatural phenomena is phenomena that violates our intuitive ontological expectations of the world.

Technological thinking is linked to

Goals, expectations, pollination is not a purpose, generic is everything happens for a reason, creationism

Creationism

Belief that life on earth was created by a supernatural agent, lies at the root of many religious beliefs, tendency to explain events in terms of secret conspiracies or conspiracy theories

False beliefs blur the lines between

Obvious rumours, famous conspiracy theories and the truth. Supported by empirical factual evidence, does not mean there are no conspiracies, but that is different to theories.

Humans are

(false) pattern-detecting, cause-inferring, purpose-seeking, and story-telling animals

Credulity

The tendency to believe readily, readiness of belief, a disposition to believe on sight evidence

“Post-truth”

Declared in 2016. Defined as “relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotional and personal belief”.

Have we become indifferent to truth?

Not really, the internet was a revolution in access to, and processing of, information which causes a deregulation in the information market.

Internet

The ability to learn from others gives humans access to extremely valuable information about how to adapt to the local environment on the cheap, but imitating others exposes the mind to maladaptive ideas

Cultural abilities come with a built-in tradeoff

Culture provides a rich source of adaptive information. But to use it efficiently individuals have to be credulous, adopting the beliefs of those around them. Allows maladaptive ideas to spread.

The environment keeps on evolving all the time,

What is detrimental now may not be down the road, you have to make a decision regarding what you have seen in others