What Does Weaving Have to Do with the Evidence-Based Science of Evolution, Behavior, and Culture?

Mending our Tapestry

Weaving the Culture

Wikipedia defines weaving as a method of textile production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interfaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. It is the act of making cloth, usually into a beautiful tapestry with cultural significance, by repeatedly crossing a single thread through two sets of long threads on a loom. The threads are tightly bound to provide structure, patterns, and beauty.  The end product is a reliable sum of its parts - together and one thread at a time becomes a tightly bound unity. It provides a tapestry that is durable.

Humans have been weaving all sorts of textiles since the beginning of civilization. As everything, it has evolved, and now manufacturing automation has changed weaving in most of the industrialized world. However, many cultures such as India, the Philippines, and countries in South America intentionally preserve the culture of weaving by hand. These cultures recognize that the craft of weaving is usually done together, slowly and cooperatively reminding each that they are interconnected. It builds trust, reliability, and integrity as well as working together for a common goal. It creates a tapestry that is durable and resilient - it can be fixed if damaged.

No wonder the social fabric project initiated by the Aspen Institute (aspeninstitute.org)  promotes the weaving metaphor as the social fabric project. We are interconnected, so we have to promote trust, honesty, reliability, reciprocity, cooperation, effective conflict resolution, and integrity through our prosocial actions. The best we can do is to start socially weaving now by increasing the frequency of our prosocial behavior that benefits the culture. We need to make prosocial behavior rewarding.

Culture Evolves

In the next posting, you will be introduced to the science of behavior and selection by consequences. For now, understand that selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in evolutionary science as natural selection, but it has been found to also account for the shaping and maintenance of the behavior of the individual human as well as other organisms and the evolution of cultures.

Culture is the social environment in which we live and behave as a group. Most of the time we do not see the cultural influence on our behavior and it is even more difficult to assess and understand how our actions influence the culture. The fact is that behavior determines culture, and culture determines behavior. It is a reciprocal determinism. Behavior is influenced by biological, personal, and environmental factors. People, through their actions, influence the environment/culture and thus themselves. Our actions change the social and physical environment in which we live. Culture is our social environment. We need to be reminded that we are also responsible to keep our physical environment healthy, by engaging in planet conservation practices.

Once we identify the environmental contingencies (defined as the relationship between a specific behavior and the frequency, regularity, and kind of positive or negative consequences that follows that response) that are maintaining a given behavior (more on this in the next posting), we can take action to intentionally change ourselves, our social environment and our physical world by reframing our culture and by creating an environment that facilitates and reinforces positive rather than negative influences on our behavior. Recognizing this fact gives us agency over our own behavior. The fact is that we are influenced by our culture; we are, both, the parents and children of our culture. Margaret Mead has told us, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Every cultural change, no matter how significant or widespread, must begin with a few individuals. If it is selected by its consequences, it will grow. Unguided, unfortunately, it can either be a cultural change for the good or for the bad.

Weaving our culture is to create the social fabric and tapestry of our culture, together, by threading our individual and communal behavior that defines the culture. It is to engage in behavior that builds trust, honesty, reliability, reciprocity, cooperation, effective conflict resolution, and integrity through our prosocial actions. It is by becoming active weavers of our culture. We are not prisoners of our culture, we behave in the culture we create. Our behavior is the thread that creates the tapestry of our culture. We can do better!

How Our Culture Has Evolved - Unguided

We have reached the point where some are seriously talking about dismantling the major components of our representative democracy. They point to the failure of our institutions to live up to the devotion of our founding immigrants to the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all. They assert that the failure to achieve these ideals in the present is justification for rejecting the progress made in the past. This rejection is tantamount to ignoring the uniqueness of the American experience that Alexis de Tocqueville famously lauded in his book Democracy in America and which millions of immigrants have sacrificed to achieve. 

David Cave, a contributor to The New York Times (11/8/22), wrote about “The World’s Democracies Ask: Why Can’t America Fix Itself?” He quoted a nurse he interviewed that was visiting the Halifax, Nova Scotia public garden with her family and she said, “ I never thought it would happen in the U.S., but I think it is going autocratic going forward.” Cave reported that we are getting “Tough Critique From Old Friends.” He also quoted, among others, Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister, “It’s like watching a family member, for whom you have enormous affection, engage in self-harm.” Adding, “It’s distressing.” The world has taken notice of our behavior. They tend to see us as a weakening democracy.

In their book The Upswing (2020), Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett (she has a Substack publication - Project Reconnect) document the significant cultural changes that occurred in the U.S. from the Gilded Age of the late 1800s to the present. Theirs is a meticulous and well-documented collection of powerful longitudinal data that document the cultural evolution of the United States. They conclude, “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From “I”  to “We” and then back again to “I.”  They also noted that since the 1960’s we have evolved and shifted from “I” to “We,” and back to “I” only leading to the behavior and environment that is quite prevalent today. Their book is a must-read!

In their book, Putnam and Garrett noted that “change, whether for the better or for the worse, is not historically inevitable,” and they examined how “economic inequality, political polarization, social fragmentation, cultural narcissism, racism, and gender discrimination each evolved over the course of the last 125 years - not merely the last fifty.” Their assertion that the up-and down-swings of communal solidarity are constructed and influenced by “human agency,”  caught our eye. Behavior drives cultural change and as a culture (the social environment) changes, so behavior changes. It is a reciprocal deterministic process.

Putnam and Garrett were not the first to recognize patterns of sweeping change in our culture. They cite Walter Lippmann in the Gilded Age who in his book Drift and Mastery anchored a movement called Progressivism that had its origins in the early 1900s. This was an era of great turbulence in the U.S. brought on by massive immigration, industrialization, and political turmoil occasioned in part by events in Europe. “There isn’t a human relation, whether, of parent and child, husband and wife, worker or employer, that doesn’t move in strange situations…We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves,” said Lippmann. Putnam and Garrett also cite Marvin Harris whose book America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (1981) documents many of the ills that Putnam and Garrett present quantitative data to support.

The cumulative historical data provided by the social sciences, as noted by the above examples, clearly document the changes in our culture over time and how at times we get into trouble as we are today. Social scientists like Putnam and Garrett point out that these swings are not inevitable and they are driven by “human action.” In their book, they plead for a return to the values of the “We” society based on community prosocial acts of reciprocity and trust. They seem to be unsure of the route to achieving a culture that supports consistent, reliable, healthy, thriving, and cooperative behavior. It is, as Tony Biglan informs us in his book The Nurture Effect (2015), a return to a nurturing culture by engaging in behavior that fosters values to action (valuestoaction.org/nurturing-communities). You may ask, how do we get there? We know for sure that, as with any evolutionary process, it is going to take some time. It is behavior driven!

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary scientist and proponent of developing practices for the intentional evolution of culture, in his book This View of Life (thisviewoflife.com), urgently warns us that evolution that is not intentionally guided and monitored can produce unintended consequences. And sure enough, our cultural evolution over the past few decades - unguided and unmeasured - has brought us to where we are today. We need to heed Wilson’s advice. Wilson informs us, “we are in a position to provide a scientific account of how the behavior associated with goodness can triumph over the behavior associated with evil--or vice versa--depending upon environmental conditions.” The focus is on behavior change and learning how to “weave” a nurturing culture. We now have evidence-based sciences, that working together in a cooperative interdisciplinary fashion, can help us map a practical and effective road and strategy for intentionally guiding and reframing our culture towards becoming nurturing again. It is going to be hard work.

Evidence-Based Science - The Unity of Knowledge in Guiding the Evolution of the Culture

Alexis de Tocqueville, who many consider the first political scientist, in his 1835 book Democracy in America, advocated “a new political science” to clarify the forces shaping the “modern” world and to provide “those who now direct society” with the knowledge to meet its greatest challenge: “reconciling liberty and democracy.” Quite a challenge, indeed, that we still don’t have a grasp on. Walter Lippmann, in his 1914 book, Drift and Mastery, proposed the application of science to inform public policy.

Jim Manzi in his 2012 book, Uncontrolled, argued that our government does not have a culture of scientific quantification and experimentation in the process of developing public policies that will lead to changes in the targeted practices and behavior. Applying scientific methods to govern and regulate our culture more effectively can be frightening. What is really frightening is the scientific fact, as elucidated by David Sloan Wilson, that cultural evolution, driven by many of our bad behaviors, is actually happening around us and is obviously taking us down a catastrophic road.

Cultural change by design is a very complex process and poses many challenges. Finding the cause and effect of these behavior/cultural problems and enacting effective strategies to guide us together toward a common and rewarding goal requires guidance from the sciences. We believe that we are at a point where the integration of the social sciences, the natural science of behavior, and other biological sciences can lead us to a unified and intentional application toward evolving our culture. In future postings, we plan to address these challenges and barriers to applying the scientific method to guide cultural change. 

E.O. Wilson was a great naturalist and biologist who studied the social behavior of ants. Wilson discussed in his book Consilience the contributions of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences in explaining how we get “from genes to culture.” He has given a bold recommendation: “There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary culture not as a territorial line but as broad and mostly unexplained terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.” 

David Sloan Wilson has noted that “evolution must be at the center of any science of change.” He emphasized the need for “a basic understanding of behavioral and cultural change.” Wilson is optimistic, informing us, “we are closer to achieving a science of intentional change than one might think.” It requires that WE all work together, including scientists and policy makers, towards positive intentional cultural change.

Definitions, Challenges, and Warnings:

Definitions

William Baum in his 2017 book Understanding Behaviorism: Behavior, Culture and Evolution, provides us with a thorough analysis and framework for the science of cultural evolution guided by behavior change. He provides an excellent operational definition (describes what the behavior of interest look like in a way that is observable, measurable, and repeatable) of culture:

“A pool of practices owned by a society, acquired by individuals from other group members, and selected by their consequences for the society. Such practices are operant (behaviors that operate in the environment to generate consequences) activities and are transmitted within and between generations by imitation and rules.”

Breaking this definition into its components we can visualize what it takes to reframe the culture: 

1. The practices are owned by society: our individual and collective actions or activities that are repeatable, regular, and recognizable in a given cultural context.

2. Acquired by individuals from other group members - this is most important - the role of parenting, education, church, and other institutions as well as modeling the behavior of significant others within the prevailing cultural practices in shaping prosocial behavior - learned behavior.

3. Selected by their consequences - the premise that all behavior that is acquired and continues to be demonstrated is a function of its consequences. Behavior is selected for being repeated or eliminated by its consequences. 

4. Such practices are operant - they are learned behavior that are prevalent and established at a time, learned by imitation and the rules of the culture. These practices demonstrate in the culture significant variation in actual practices by an individual and groups, and some practices occur at a higher rate than others depending on the prevailing environmental contingencies in the culture at the time. These practices, when they evolve unguided, account for the many downswings and upswings in our culture. According to Putnam and Garrett, we have been on a downswing since the 1960s and we may add, with occasional blips.

Focusing on the social environment and behavior is where the remedies for bad behavior are. Science, together, can guide us in reframing our culture to increase the frequency of prosocial behavior by learning values to action practices that benefit the culture for the greater good.

Challenges

B.F. Skinner was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. He advanced the natural science of behavior and was a prolific researcher and writer who, with his followers and colleagues, scientifically demonstrated that the environment determines behavior. In his 1953 book Science and Human Behavior, he proposed an account of the essential components of culture within the framework of the natural sciences. His objective was to bring the scientific principles of behavior to engineer the design of cultural practices and technologies that have a higher probability of enhancing the survival of a culture. History teaches us that besides natural disasters or war, bad behavior is what cumulatively, slowly but eventually evolves the degeneration and destruction of a culture by reducing social cohesion, trust and cooperation and that environment increases social fragmentation and reduces the sense of belonging for some to the prevalent culture, while keeping its people, usually with increased frustration, isolation, anger and detachment.

Skinner concluded in his 1981 Science article Selection by Consequences:

“A proper recognition of the selective action of the environment means a change in our conception of the origin of behavior which is possibly as extensive as that of the origin of species. So long as we cling to the view that a person is an initiating doer or causer of behavior, we shall probably continue to neglect the conditions which must be changed if we are to solve our problems.”

The challenge involves learning to look at the determinants of behavior that are to be found in the environment/culture in which we behave. One of our main objectives is to engage in conversation about the evidence provided by the science of what reliably and predictably are the causes of behavior. 

Warnings

Skinner gave us this warning in his 1976 book, Walden Two:

“It is now widely recognized that great changes must be made in the American way of life. Not only can we not face the rest of the world while consuming and polluting as we do, we cannot for long face ourselves while acknowledging the violence and chaos in which we live.”

Here we are, more than 45 years later, and the frequency of our bad behavior continues to increase at a rapid rate. As Stephen Stills told us in his classic protest song of the 1960s, “There’s something happening here. But what it is ain’t exactly clear.” It is time to find a better way before we run out of time. We propose the implementation of an intentionally guided cultural evolution; by building a social infrastructure of behavior-based practices to promote the common good. More to come.

For those of you who are interested in delving deeper into these issues, we suggest:

H. S. Pennypacker & Francisco I. Perez - Engineering the Upswing: A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture - 2022, Sloan Publishing. It can be bought at The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies bookstore (behavior.org) or at Amazon. All proceeds benefit The Cambridge Center.

Francisco I. Perez

Henry S. Pennypacker

Faris R. Kronfli