Culture & Human Nature

Question 1

where does culture come from?

Answer 1

• Evoked culture: humans have biologically encoded database of behaviours → activated in certain environmental conditions
• • Ex. in conditions of high pathogen prevalence, encoded behaviour is to stick with people you know and reduce extraversion

Question 2

how is culture transmitted?

Answer 2

• Transmitted culture: people learn about cultural practices through social learning or modelling
• • Ex. looking to others for information on what to do in unfamiliar situations

Question 3

Berry’s Ecocultural Model

Answer 3

• Background variables: at population level; backdrop that informs everything else (ex. Geography, climate → ecological context; government systems, wars, level of stability → sociopolitical context)
• • Will eventually lead to:
• – Biological adaptations (genetics): Can lead to ecological influences and genetic transmission (process variables)
• – Cultural adaptations (change in social practices): Can lead to cultural transmission and acculturation (when sociopolitical context directly influences your psychology) (process variables)
• • Both biological and cultural influence psychological variables (observable behaviours and inferred characteristics)

Question 4

Understanding Berry’s ecocultural model: Sky burial example

Answer 4

• common in Tibet
• • Background variables: ecological context (very cold; too cold to bury people, not enough vegetation to use as fuel for cremation) → solution: feed to vultures
• – Leads to cultural adaptation → cultural significance, transmission of this practice, etc.

Question 5

cultural transmission

Answer 5

• transfer and acquisition of cultural information through social learning
• 3 types of transmission: vertical, horizontal, oblique

Question 6

vertical transmission

Answer 6

• transmission of cultural info from parent → child (specifically biological parent to biological child)
• Very common, especially in non-industrialized societies (mothers spend lots of time with babies; facilitates vertical transmission through explicit explanation or modelling)

Question 7

horizontal transmission

Answer 7

• transmission of cultural info between peers (usually people of the same generation)
• Ex. cousin teaching you how to cook

Question 8

oblique transmission

Answer 8

• transmission of cultural info from someone of an older generation to someone from a younger generation who are not biological parent and child
• Ex. grandparents, teachers

Question 9

relative importance of cultural transmission

Answer 9

• varies with size and degree of industrialization of a society
• • Hunter-gatherer societies: vertical transmission extremely important for first ~5 years, then horizontal and oblique transmission become a bit more important (but still large emphasis on vertical transmission)
• • Industrialized societies: less emphasis on vertical transmission → we tend to outsource oblique education/cultural transmission earlier (ie. daycare, pre-school, etc.); social media also facilitates horizontal and oblique transmission (large emphasis on oblique and horizontal transmission overall)

Question 10

2 cognitive tools that facilitate cultural transmission

Answer 10

• Language: form of communication between individuals that can be used to convey ideas
• • Complex language is unique to humans
• • Animal language might mutate, but does not become more cumulative, complex, or generative
• • Necessary for transmission of culture
• Theory of Mind:
• • Understanding that others have different beliefs, thoughts, and perspectives than oneself
• • Not inborn, but developed through childhood via social experiences (ex. Social interactions, playing with others, talking to others)
• • little evidence of this in wild animals

Question 11

Tomasello’s theory of cultural learning

Answer 11

• Theory of mind enables humans to engage in unique, species-specific forms of learning
• Humans can understand another person’s perspective, but other species cannot
• Different forms of learning emerge at distinct developmental stages, each involving a revolution in cognitive tools (more sophisticated ToM)

Question 12

Tomasello’s theory of cultural learning: birth-9 months

Answer 12

• Infants begin to show interest in objects
• • Focus is primarily on objects
• • No attention paid to the intention of the teacher
• Infant engages in emulative learning
• • Learner tries to figure out how an object affects environment; how to manipulate object (ex. Figuring out how to open a jar → trying to bang it on the table; focusing on aspects of environment rather than the model’s internal goals; not copying the model exactly if the model is doing useless actions)
• • Primarily seen amongst infants and nonhuman primates
• • can be adaptive, but it does not allow for accumulation of cultural info

Question 13

Tomasello’s theory of cultural learning: 9 months-4 years

Answer 13

• Recognize others as “intentional agents” (people with independent intentions/goals)
• Perspective-taking, gaze-following, and joint attentional interactions → the beginning of theory of mind and emergence of cultural transmission
• Imitative learning:
• • Focus on fulfilling goal of the model → what kinds of behaviours do they need to take to bring about that goal?
• • Over-imitates model (copies everything because they’re not sure what will work and what won’t)
• • Ex. recognizing that opening a jar happens because you want to open it → know to twist it and pop it open)

Question 14

when is imitative learning most likely to occur?

Answer 14

• demonstrator/model is warm and nurturing, an authority figure, similar to the child (ie. gender and ethnicity)
• demonstrator/model has been rewarded for their behaviour
• Situation is ambiguous or unfamiliar
• Learning has been rewarded for previous imitative learning

Question 15

Tomasello’s theory of cultural learning: 4-6 years of age

Answer 15

• Learner recognizes others as “mental agents” (have independent thoughts, but may or may not be correct) –> false beliefs tasks
• Learner engages in deception (learn to lie)
• Learner starts referring to mental states of others (eg. “He thinks that fish is yummy”)
• Engages in instructed learning

Question 16

What is instructed learning?

Answer 16

• learning based on explicit instructions from teacher on how to behave in certain contexts
• Learning interalizes instructions; regulates own behaviour in the future in similar context using intersubjective dialogue (basically talking to themself in their own head in order to inhibit inappropriate behaviour)

Question 17

Tomasello’s theory of cultural learning: 6-7 years of age

Answer 17

• Children recognize others as “reflective agents” (people who can reflect on others’ beliefs, ex. “She thinks that I think that”)
• Children think about others’ thoughts about them, or simulate PoV of some “hypothetical other” (“people might think that”)
• Engage in collaborative learning

Question 18

What is collaborative learning?

Answer 18

• entails transactive discussions with each other and joint planning → allows for co-creation of new cultural information → key for developing moral reasoning skills (because you’re gaining and internalizing more perspectives)
• Ex. Kids lock a toy in a box, discuss how to open it, decide to smash it with a rock to open it → that solution is a creation of new cultural information

Question 19

is culture unique to humans?

Answer 19

• If adopting the psychological definition of culture (learning info from others via cultural transmission), then it’s not unique to humans
• • Other animals with culture: whales, rats, birds (ex. chimpanzees have different foraging behaviours)
• Humans are not unique in having culture or engaging in cultural learning, BUT humans can learn cultural information much quicker than other animals, and we have “cumulative cultural complexity” (as time progresses, our culture becomes much more complex)

Question 20

2 types of cultural learning

Answer 20

• Individual learning (figuring things out on our own)
• • Problem: you have to figure out everything - what works, doesn’t work, etc. all on your own
• Social learning (learning from a more knowledgeable other; transmitting cultural knowledge)
• • Can happen through modelling, observation, or explicit instruction
• • Allows us to build on previous knowledge and refine it (ex. Rock can smash things, eventually replace rock with metal object, eventually replace with hammer
• “Ratchet effect”: over generations, cultural information will increase in complexity

Question 21

The statistics of our brains

Answer 21

• 2% of body weight

- Uses 16% of basal metabolism to keep brain functioning (other animals use 1-3%) –> energetically expensive

Question 22

Cephalization factor

Answer 22

• Line of best fit
• Describes ideal between average body weight of a species and average brain weight of a species
• Can be used to estimate brain weight based on body weight

Question 23

Encephalization quotient (EQ)

Answer 23

• EQ = actual brain weight divided by expected brain weight based on body weight
  If EQ is equal to 1, then the expected brain weight is 100% accurate, – EQ greater than 1 - brain heavier than supposed to be, EQ less than 1 - brain lighter than it’s supposed to be
• Greater EQ associated with being a more social species and having more complex social systems
• Humans have a very high EQ (7) –> higher than any other animal examined, meaning brain is large (not massive, but bigger than expected)

Question 24

3 propositions for why we have such large brains

Answer 24

• Fruit consumption: Primates eat a lot of fruits, but they’re seasonal and grow in patches → primates must keep mental map of when and where fruits grow
• • BUT animals with high fruit diets don’t necessarily have high neocortex ratio, so this probably isn’t a valid explanation
• Food extraction: Some primates eat difficult foods requiring ingenuity to extract → primates with more ingenuity have bigger brains
• • BUT there doesn’t appear to be a reliable relationship between neocortex ratio and foraging methods, so this also probably isn’t a valid explanation
• Social brain (Social Brain Hypothesis): Some primates have very complex social worlds (hierarchies, networks, norms) → knowing how to navigate these relationships requires a lot of brain power
• • There does appear to be a positive relationship between mean group size (indicator of sociality) and neocortex ratio

Question 25

Neocortex

Answer 25

• Associated with higher order functions such as sensory perception, language, and conscious, complex thought
• Most newly evolved part of cerebral cortex
• Most relevant for complex information such as culture
• When brains of mammals increase in size, it’s usually the neocortex that gets bigger
• Neocortex ratio = volume of neocortex divided by volume of rest of brain

Question 26

Cultural brain hypothesis

Answer 26

• Giant feedback loop between:
• • Social learning: we learn from models to gain information rather than individual learning
• • Group size: cultural learning more effective in large groups
• • Brain size: large brains needed to deal with the challenges of being part of larger groups; allows for better learning, more complexity
• Results in increased cultural complexity

Question 27

Prestige bias

Answer 27

• attending more to models who are better respected and garner more people’s attention
• • ex. kids will look at adults whom other kids are looking at; kids will copy adults who other people are watching compared to those who aren’t being watched
• one way of figuring out who to copy when you’re in a large group
• evolutionarily adaptive: more likely to acquire useful cultural knowledge this way
• advertisers play to our prestige bias when putting celebs in ads (we want to copy them and buy the product)

Question 28

What we’ve given up for our big brains

Answer 28

• loss of muscle

- loss of intestinal length