The Science for Shaping a Sustainable Future
The Nuts and Bolts Driving the Cultural Evolution and its Consequences
Cultural Evolution - Explained
Cultural evolution is the process by which living cultures change and develop over time. It is behavior-driven and remains mostly unguided. To manage and guide our culture toward the common good, we must learn and understand how cultures adapt, learn, and transmit knowledge and behavior within and across generations.
A culture is the physical and social environment that shapes, sustains, and drives our behavior at a given time. Our unique environmental/learning history predicts the behavior we engage in at a given time. No two people have the same learning experience. Genetic evolution involves changes in biological traits over time. Cultural evolution involves gradual changes in shared ideas, beliefs, values, customs, practices, and technologies, contributing to the changes in the structure and functions of social organizations and institutions.
The culture is continually evolving. Evolutionary processes and events often go unnoticed. We are mostly unaware of changes and what drives those changes. We need to become more aware. To become aware of these changes requires a historical perspective. The importance of awareness and historical context is crucial in understanding cultural evolution and personal behavior.
A cohesive culture tends to create an environment where people learn and share common values, beliefs, and goals as well as engage in cooperative behavior that contributes to a WE society required for working together to solve our problems and make life better for all. A dysfunctional culture is mostly driven by multiple factions of people promoting and pursuing their interests making it difficult to create consensus, to govern and be governed, as well as making it impossible to create the social environment that leads to the common good.
Key Mechanisms Guiding Cultural Evolution
Variation
Just like genetic evolution, cultural evolution involves variation. Different individuals and groups within a culture have learned diverse ideas, expectations, practices, and perspectives. Because of these diverse learning experiences, individual behavior varies. The uniqueness of each individual early home environment heavily influences this variation. Here is where family, child-rearing practices, socialization and learning social skills, acquiring values and beliefs, schooling, church, financial resources, and other multiple factors including the love for lifelong learning are shaping the child into what that child’s behavior will most likely be in the future as an adult. The home environment is that important.
Selection by Consequences
Selection by consequences plays a crucial role in driving cultural evolution. It is the process by which behavior/practices, shared beliefs and values, and common goals are shaped and maintained, and may contribute to the decay or improvement of cultural fitness at a given time. Behavior that is reinforced by positive consequences is more likely to be repeated and maintained, while those behaviors that are followed by negative consequences are less likely to endure and are eventually extinguished. The effects of a particular consequence are determined by how it impacts the future probability and frequency of the targeted behavior. That means that a specific consequence may be a positive consequence for me but a negative consequence for somebody else, depending on the personal learning history.
Selection by consequences operates at multiple levels within cultural evolution. At the individual level, an individual’s behavior is influenced and selected by the consequences they experience. If the individual engaging in certain cultural practices leads to positive outcomes, such as increased social acceptance or access to resources, individuals are more likely to adopt and transmit those practices to future generations. On the other hand, practices that lead to negative consequences may be discouraged and subsequently abandoned.
Selection by consequences also can operate at the level of groups. Cultural practices that contribute to the survival, reproduction, and cohesion within a group are more likely to be retained and transmitted to future generations. Behaviors that become beneficial for society are reinforced and maintained, while those that are detrimental tend to gradually fade away. However, it is important to consider that dysfunctional cultural practices can be selected, like the recent and fairly common behavior of rule-breaking associated with not fully stopping at a stop sign. One witnesses this practice frequently, but the person most of the time gets away with it without any negative consequences. Over time this behavior of rule-breaking can increase in frequency and generalize to other similar behaviors as well as others see the person frequently get away with it and is reinforced by engaging in the risky behavior that leads to saving a few seconds of your drive.
When we recognize and become aware of the impact of the environmental factors around us on behavior, we can better appreciate how societies and cultures evolve, adapt, and transmit the behavior that shapes the culture and in turn, understand how one’s behavior evolves as a consequence of the cultural environment created. It is a reciprocal relationship. We need to keep it healthy.
Transmission
Cultural behavior and practices are transmitted within and between generations by various means, including language and verbal narratives, education, imitation, storytelling, apprenticeship, the visual public media and written records such as books. The fidelity and accuracy of the information transmitted varies and this can lead to both faithful replication and gradual modification of cultural values and beliefs contributing to behavior change that evolves the culture.
Social Learning
Humans have an exceptional ability to learn from others. Social learning facilitates the rapid spread and accumulation of cultural knowledge. Observational learning, teaching, and other forms of imitation play significant roles in cultural transmission. We are what we learned. Our culture relies on reliable and positive parenting, quality education, and many other teaching resources, but perhaps most important is the example of others to create worthy citizens.
Cumulative Effect
We can evolve a culture that is healthy or a culture that is sick. It does depend on the prevalent contingencies of reinforcement at the time of shaping behavior. A culture where the prevalent behavior is “bad behavior” will become a sick culture. Evolving a healthy and prosocial culture is a cumulative process and the effects are observed over many generations. As healthy and prosocial behavior (behavior that benefits the culture) evolves, with an emphasis on lifelong learning, contributing to individual worthy performance (more on this in a future posting) the foundation of lifelong learning contributes to individuals engaging in innovations, acquiring cultural knowledge leading to personal investment in behavior that improves the culture - the complexity and richness of the culture evolves by creating an environment where prosocial behavior, innovation, engaging in worthy performances and lifelong learning are rewarded. This cumulative process distinguishes cultural evolution from biological evolution.
Cultural Niche Construction
Behavior modifies and shapes our social and physical environments, creating cultural niches. Prevalent behavior in the culture plays an evolutionary role, transforming selective environments by individual and collective actions. Cultural evolution includes the feedback loop where cultural adaptations influence the physical and social environment, which in turn, affects the direction of cultural evolution. The culture can become fragmented by this process.
Cultural Diversity
A product of cultural evolution is the development of a remarkable diversity of practices, customs, and beliefs across different segments of society and regions. Cultural differences arise as a consequence of the local environmental conditions, historical contingencies of reinforcement, social interactions, and the accumulation of unique cultural behavior. Cultural evolution is a dynamic process that has allowed humans to develop increasingly complex societies, accumulate knowledge, and adapt to a wide range of environments. It has been a fundamental driver of human progress and has shaped the diverse world of cultures we observe today.
Selection by Consequences and its Role in Driving Cultural Evolution
It is important to note that the consequences driving cultural evolution are not always immediate or directly observable. They can be complex and multifaceted, and involve both short-term and long-term outcomes. Consequently, cultural evolution is a dynamic and iterative process (the repetition of a process to generate a sequence of outcomes), with behavior and ideas constantly being tested, selected, and modified based on their consequences.
Selection by consequences plays a fundamental role in driving cultural evolution. It is through the selection and transmission of behavior and ideas that lead to positive consequences that cultures adapt, evolve, and shape the well-being and success of individuals and create collective and cooperative societies over time. The process of adaptation promotes practices that lead to positive outcomes at both individual and group levels and favors behavior that is adaptive to specific environments. By understanding this process, we can gain insight into how cultural practices and beliefs are developed, maintained, and transmitted across generations.
Contingencies of Reinforcement and Selection
Selection by consequences and contingencies of reinforcement are closely intertwined. Selection by consequences is a broader framework that highlights how behavior is shaped and maintained through its consequences, that is, the consequences that follow behavior determine whether it will occur again in the future. This is a well-established scientific fact.
Contingencies of reinforcement, on the other hand, refer to the specific arrangement between behavior and its consequences. A contingency of reinforcement describes the conditions under which a particular consequence is contingent upon the occurrence of a specific behavior.
Selection by consequences occurs as a result of the contingencies of reinforcement that are prominent in the environment/culture at the time. As noted previously, when a behavior results in favorable consequences, it is more likely to be repeated in the future. Conversely, if a behavior is followed by an aversive consequence, it is less likely to be repeated.
Selection by consequences determines that the environment/culture acts as the ultimate selector of behavior. A healthy culture will select more WE-cooperative and prosocial behavior that benefits the culture. A maladaptive culture will select more selfish (I), uncooperative behavior.
By intentionally arranging the contingencies in an environment, one can shape behavior by increasing or decreasing the probability of a specific response. The fact is that what determines the health of a culture are the contingencies of reinforcement that are in place in the environment/culture at a given time. The prevalent contingencies of reinforcement are evolving and changing unguided, and these changes can eventually take us to chaos and the ultimate demise of the culture as we know it.
Understanding and intentionally applying effective contingencies of reinforcement are essential practices for shaping and maintaining the prosocial behavior that a culture needs to create a social environment where we all can flourish.
Guided Cultural Evolution? - Food for Thought
David Sloan Wilson (This View of Life) is a prominent evolutionary biologist and a student of evolutionary cultural anthropology. He has made significant contributions to the study of cultural evolution and its relationship to biological evolution. He recognizes the role of an unguided cultural evolution, but he also expresses serious concern about where an unguided cultural evolution can take us. He challenges us to consider the potential for applying a scientific approach to facilitate an intentional cultural evolution.
Wilson points out that cultural evolution, much like biological evolution, is a result of variation, selection, and transmission. He acknowledges that unguided processes play a significant role in shaping culture, such as the accumulation of traditional practices or social norms without deliberate human intention. This perspective aligns with the concept that cultural evolution can occur without explicit guidance or planning.
However, Wilson also emphasizes the capacity and need for deliberate, cultural evolution, where we shape and modify our cultural practices. He advocates for an approach that combines intentional and unguided cultural evolution, recognizing that intentional cultural evolution allows for adaptive responses to challenges and changing environments.
Wilson promotes using evolutionary theory (and we add the knowledge from the science of behavior) to understand cultural change and proposes that cultural evolution can intentionally become a means to improve social well-being. He believes that by recognizing the dynamics of unguided and intentional cultural evolution, we can better understand how cultures change and adapt over time.
Wilson’s perspective on unguided cultural evolution unveils the complex interplay between intentional and unguided processes in shaping cultural change. He proposes that we need to incorporate both perspectives to gain a broader understanding of how cultures evolve and adapt. Developing tools and practices to intentionally correct the course of cultural evolution towards the common good offers hope that we can reverse our current direction and achieve the objective where prosocial behavior becomes prominent.
In our book Engineering the Upswing: A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture (Pennypacker & Perez, 2022), we provide a behavior-based framework to guide our culture to work together toward the common good.
Pass it on and see you soon!