Week three CULTURE. CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE.

BELIEFS, VALUES,
PERCEPTION WORLDVIEW

What is Culture?
Culture refers to the nonphysical ideas that people have about their culture, including beliefs,
values, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions.Culture is an essential part
of being human. No one is completely without it; in fact, an individual can be part of many
cultures and subcultures. For example, someone who lives in the U.S. could be part of the
national culture in addition to the distinct culture of the South, a religious community, a heritage
group, and more.

How would you describe Kenyan culture? Would you talk about the way we dress? The foods
that originated here? The language? The way we are patriotic? What about our individualistic
values and emphasis on competition?

Material Vs. Nonmaterial Culture

Sociologists describe two interrelated aspects of human culture: the physical objects of the
culture and the ideas associated with these objects.

Material culture refers to the physical objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define
their culture. These include homes, neighbourhoods, cities, schools, churches, synagogues,
temples, mosques, offices, factories and plants, tools, means of production, goods and products,
stores, and so forth. All of these physical aspects of a culture help to define its members'
behaviors and perceptions. For example, technology is a vital aspect of material culture in today's
United States. American students must learn to use computers to survive in college and business,
in contrast to young adults in the Yanomamo society in the Amazon who must learn to build
weapons and hunt.

Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that
surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the
behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in. Material culture can be
described as any object that humans use to survive, define social relationships, represent facets of
identity, or benefit peoples' state of mind, social, or economic standing. [4] Material culture is
contrasting to symbolic culture, which includes nonmaterial symbols, beliefs, and social
constructs. The term is most commonly used in archaeological and anthropological studies, to
define material or artifacts as they are understood in relation to specific cultural and historic
contexts, communities, and belief systems.

Material culture includes all the physical things that people create and attach meaning to.
Clothing, food, tools, and architecture are examples of material culture that most people would
think of.
There are many, many elements and aspects of culture. However, each can be categorized as
either material or nonmaterial cultureNatural objects and materials (rock, dirt, trees, etc.) aren't
considered to be part of material culture. However, how people view natural objects and how
they use them are.
Nonmaterial culture includes creations and abstract ideas that are not embodied in physical
objects. In other words, any intangible products created and shared between the members of a
culture over time are aspects of their nonmaterial culture. Social roles, rules, ethics, and beliefs
are just some examples. All of them are crucial guides for members of a culture to use to know
how to behave in their society and interpret the world. Non‐material For instance, the non‐
material cultural concept of religion consists of a set of ideas and beliefs about God, worship,
morals, and ethics. These beliefs, then, determine how the culture responds to its religious topics,
issues, and events.
When considering non‐material culture, sociologists refer to several processes that a culture uses
to shape its members' thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Four of the most important of these are
symbols, language, values, and norms.
Culture Vs. Nation Vs. Society
The word culture is often used as a synonym for nation and society, but they aren't the same
thing. A nation is a territory with designated borders. A nation can be found on a map.
A society is a population in which people interact and share common interests. A society can be
found in a nation. Culture, on the other hand, is a people's shared way of living. Culture can be
found in a society, and it can also be shared between societies.

Cultures and Communication

Asalaam. Nín hao. Hujambo. Howdy. There are so many ways just to say hello!
No matter where you are in the world, communication is important. But communicating across
cultures can be pretty hard. And I don't just mean that there's a language barrier, although that
can be an issue. No, I mean that cultures actually have some very different ways of
communicating. Some cultures are informal, some cultures use a whole series of ritual greetings
before having a conversation, and some cultures consider it rude to show up to a meeting on
time.
But what do all these cultures have in common? Well, for one, you can offend each of them if
you don't understand their communication practices. And we want to avoid that. So what do we
do? Well, to put it simply, we learn to communicate!

The Nature of Culture

Like communication, culture is ubiquitous and has a profound effect on humans. Culture is
simultaneously invisible yet pervasive. As we go about our daily lives, we are not overtly
conscious of our culture’s influence on us. How often have you sat in your dorm room or
classroom, for example, and consciously thought about what it means to be a U.S. citizen? As
you stand in the lunch line, do you say to yourself, “I am acting like a U.S. citizen”? As you sit
in your classroom, do you say to yourself, “The professor is really acting like a U.S. citizen”?
Yet most of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are culturally driven. One need only step
into a culture different from one’s own to feel the immense impact of culture.
Culture has a direct influence on the physical, relational, and perceptual contexts. For example,
the next time you enter your communication classroom, consider how the room is arranged
physically, including where you sit and where the professor teaches, the location of the
chalkboard, windows, and so on. Does the professor lecture from behind a lectern? Do the
students sit facing the professor? Is the chalkboard used? Next, think about your relationship
with the professor and the other students in your class. Is the relationship formal or informal? Do
you interact with the professor and students about topics other than class material? Would you
consider the relationship personal or impersonal? Finally, think about your perceptual disposition
—that is, your attitudes, motivations, and emotions about the class. Are you happy to be in the
class? Do you enjoy attending? Are you nervous when the instructor asks you a question? To a
great extent, the answers to these questions are contingent on your culture. The physical
arrangement of classrooms, the social relationship between students and teachers, and the
perceptual profiles of the students and teachers vary significantly from culture to culture.

Like communication, culture is difficult to define. To be sure, more than 60 years ago, two well-
known anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, found and examined 300
definitions of culture, no two of which were the same.20 Perhaps too often, people think of
culture only in terms of the fine arts, geography, or history. Small towns or rural communities
are often accused of having no culture. Yet culture exists everywhere. There is as much culture
in Willard, New Mexico (population 240), as there is in New York, New York (population
8,500,000). The two cultures are just different. Simply put, culture is people.
Although there may not be a universally accepted definition of culture, there are a number of
properties of culture that most people would agree describe its essence. In this book, culture is
defined as an accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by an identifiable
group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol systems.

Accumulated Pattern of Values, Beliefs, and Behaviours

People of the same culture have an accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviors shared
by an identifiable group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol
systems taxes. Cultures can be defined by their value and belief systems and by the actions of
their members. People who exist in the same culture generally share similar values and beliefs
(see Table 1.2). In the United States, for example, individuality is highly valued. An individual’s
self-interest takes precedence over group interests. U.S. citizens believe that people are unique.
Moreover, U.S. citizens value personal independence. Conversely, in Japan, a collectivistic and
relatively homogeneous culture—a sense of groupness and group harmony—is valued. Most
Japanese see themselves as members of a group first and as individuals second. Where U.S.
citizens value independence, Japanese value interdependence. The values of a particular culture
lead to a set of expectations and rules prescribing how people should behave in that culture.
Although many U.S. citizens prefer to think of themselves as unique individuals, most of them
behave in similar ways. Observe the students around you in your classes. Although you may
prefer to think that you are very different from your peers, you are really quite similar to them.
Most of your peers follow a similar behavioral pattern to your own. For example, on a day-to-
day basis, most of your peers attend classes, take examinations, go to lunch, study, party, and
write papers. U.S. citizens share a similar behavioral profile. Most work an average of 40 hours a
week, receive some form of payment for their work, and pay some of their earnings in culture.
Most spend their money on homes and cars, and almost every home in the United States has a
television. Although U.S. citizens view themselves as unique individuals, most of them have
similar behavioral patterns.
A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media
Digital media
Digital media are media encoded in digital format, typically to be transmitted and consumed on
electronic devices, such as computers and smartphones. Digital media of wide diffusion includes
emails, digital audio and video recordings, ebooks, blogs, instant messaging, and more recently
social media. Although,
- digital media started to be developed with the creation of digital computers in the 1940s,
- their wide cultural impact can be traced back only to two or three decades, with the
widespread diffusion of personal computers and especially the internet (Briggs and
Burke, 2009).
- Social media and global connectivity (e.g., allowed by portable digital devices) are even
more recent developments. Facebook, in its early stage limited to university or high-
school students and employees of a handful of companies, was open to the public 10
years ago, in September 2006 (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).
- The first version of the iPhone, which gave the initial momentum to the worldwide
diffusion of smartphones, was launched shortly after, at the beginning of 2007 (West and
Mace, 2010).
- Digital media, and social media in particular, have today an enormous reach. Facebook
for example counts, as of June 2016, more than 1.7 billion monthly active users1.
- Digital media has influence on the behaviour of a vast part of the human population
consequently, academic interest for digital media has grown rapidly in different
disciplines.
- Cultural evolution, is the scientific study that analyses how the massive diffusion of
digital media influences human cultural behavior.
- a central topic in cultural evolutionary research, might influence cultural transmission in
the digital age, and conversely how digitally-supported cultural transmission might
disrupt these biases.
- the cultural evolution framework helps us to better understand the changes we are
confronted with in our society.

Cultural evolution
- Cultural evolution is a relatively recent scientific field that studies human and, partly,
non-human cultural behaviour (see Mesoudi, 2015, for a recent review).
- Cultural behaviour is generally defined as behavior transmitted through social learning,
as opposed to individual learning or genetic inheritance
- Cultural evolutionists study things such as the evolution of uniquely human forms of
cooperation, indigenous knowledge of plants' properties, the cultural evolution of
language), the spread of fashions in contemporary culture, naming of babies or dog
breeds or traditional medical treatments
- Culture should be considered an evolutionary process a strong commitment to provide
explanations that are naturalistic and quantitative, as well as grounded in cognitive
science and evolutionary theory.
- A cultural phenomenon is a population-level aggregate of individual-level interactions
and that, to explain the former, one needs to take seriously the latter. Accordingly, the
works of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) and Boyd and Richerson (1985) are
considered as establishing modern cultural evolution. These works consisted in
 - mathematical models, inspired by population genetics, developing formalisms to link
micro-processes of transmission—like different “directions” of transmission, e.g., from
parents to offsprings, between peers, etc. or different transmission biases,
- to macro-processes of cultural change—like the diffusion dynamics of cultural traits.
- the role of individual cognition in the explanation of cultural patterns, focusing on the
fact that the success of some widespread beliefs may depend on them being generally
attractive to human minds
- The psychology of digital media, in particular online activities (sometimes described as
“cyberpsychology”
- A cultural evolution approach adds an explicit interest for the micro-macro link, in other
words, for how individual-level properties (e.g., psychological) influence population-
level dynamics and vice versa.
- One of the opportunities that the widespread diffusion of digital media offers to social
sciences is the availability of vast amounts of data on human behaviour
- the cultural evolution approach is in a better position to make sense also of the
quantitative data that digital media usage quasi-automatically produces.
- Computer scientists and physicists had promptly made use of these data to study the
diffusion of information in digital social networks These works importantly include
quantitative analysis and models, and they can offer valuable insights on online activity.
- However, the perspective of cultural evolution can complement this thread of research by
providing a refined view of the micro-processes of transmission and of the psychological
motivations underpinning them.
- To sum up, cultural evolution may offer a privileged perspective to look at digital media,
including both a sophisticated view of human behavior

Cultural Transmission biases in the digital age

For the majority of cultural evolutionists the widespread utilization of social learning is the
reason of the ecological success of the human species (Henrich, 2016). Social learning provides a
shortcut to long and potentially dangerous individual learning and a fast and flexible alternative
to genetic evolution. However, simply copying from others can be risky: to be effective, social
learning needs to be selective (Laland, 2004). According to this view, social learning is made
possible by domain-general heuristics—often referred to as “transmission biases” or “social-
learning strategies”—helping us to choose what, when, and from whom to learn (Boyd and
Richerson, 1985). To use a mundane example, imagine you find yourself in a new and unknown
town, searching a restaurant for dinner. You may first decide that is worth to look to what others
do, instead of trying to figure it out by yourself (“copy when asocial learning is costly”), and
then that it does not make much sense to follow the first person you see in the street, but look for
restaurants that seem full of customers (“copy the majority”). After few days, you might have
found your favorite place, and you can stop to check where other people go (“copy when
uncertain”).
Transmission biases are a good place to start as much research has been developed in cultural
evolution on this topic. Theoretical models and simulations have explored the adaptive value of
different biases, and predictions from the models have been tested in empirical settings (see
Rendell et al., 2011, for a review). In parallel, various works have attempted to detect the
presence of transmission biases in real-life cultural dynamics (e.g., Reyes-Garcia et al., 2008;
Henrich and Broesch, 2011; Kandler and Shennan, 2013; Acerbi and Bentley, 2014).
Importantly, for our focus on digital media, transmission biases are considered a suite of
psychological adaptations shaped by natural selection (Henrich, 2016), hence generally effective
in the social and physical environment of small-scale societies. A question only partially
explored in cultural evolution is how these biases scale in contemporary, complex, societies, and
especially in the novel digital environment.

Prestige/fame
Various heuristics are available when choosing from whom to copy. From an evolutionary point
of view, for example, kin share a common genetic interest, so they will be willing to circulate
useful information. Copying from parents and from other close members of the family makes
thus perfect sense. Elders, especially in small-scale and slow-changing societies, have two
important qualities. First, they had time to learn themselves a substantial part of the cultural
repertoire of the society, and, second, they must have done it effectively, exactly because they
arrived to old age. Age-biased social learning is thus another evolutionary expected strategy
(Henrich, 2016).
However, for specialized expertises (i.e., only few people possess them), or for expertises that
exhibit variability in a population (i.e., some people are very good at them and others are not),
kin- and age- based strategies are not particularly effective. In these cases, an alternative is to try
to assess directly the ability of others. Copying skilled or successful individuals is then another
of the heuristics suggested by cultural evolutionists (see e.g., Mesoudi, 2011, for an experimental
approach). This strategy presents, in turn, another problem. Skills can be opaque, difficult to
recognize, and this is especially true when one does not possess the expertise in question, which
is exactly the case when there is the need to learn it. Similarly, success can be volatile, or due to
luck. How many successful hunts an apprentice hunter should assess before deciding to copy
from a particular individual and not from another?

Popularity
A similar way of reasoning can be applied to frequency-dependent biases. In the idiom of
cultural evolution, frequency-dependent biases are heuristics that make use of the estimated
frequency of a cultural trait to help deciding whether to copy it or not. The usefulness of positive,
i.e., preferences for popular traits, frequency-dependent biases is easy to understand. When in a
new environment, or when confronted with a new technology, it makes sense to take advantage
of the cumulative experience of other individuals.
When cultural evolutionists talk about positive frequency-dependent biases, they generally refers
to “conformity” in a precise and quite restrictive sense, meaning a disproportionate tendency to
copy from the majority (Boyd and Richerson, 1985). This means that, returning to our
restaurants example, if 60 people are eating in restaurant A and 40 people in restaurant B, the
probability to choose A should be higher than 60% in conformist-biased social learning. In fact,
it has been noted that, in almost all cases, social learning imply to “follow the majority” in a
loose sense (Boyd and Richerson, 1985). In the above case, for example, one individual would
still be more likely to go to restaurant A without any particular bias, i.e., copying randomly

Cultural transmission
 - Cultural “evolution” implies that ideas and behaviours spread by replicating gene-like
from individual to individual,
- The oral transmission of stories provides a case in point. Transmission chain experiments,
where individuals are asked to iteratively listen to and repeat short narratives (starting
from Bartlett, 1932), have shown that, because of memory and attention limits, or biases
from previous knowledge, the original material is quickly disrupted
- In fact, what is surprising is on the contrary how some orally transmitted folktales have
remained relatively stable through centuries or even millennia
- There are various options to explain cultural macro-stability.
- Some prefer to concentrate on universal, or slow-changing, factors of attraction that make
some cultural traits, or some features of them, particularly memorable, or more likely to
be reproduced individually.
- The stability of a long, oral, transmission chain of a story—say Cinderella—does not
depend on a series of faithful acts of copying, but on the fact that some features of the
story are particularly likely to be remembered and reconstructed in successive retellings
- the success of folktales due to the presence of minimally counterintuitive concepts
- another might be the relationship between Cinderella and the wicked stepmother
(stepparents are considered a serious threat for stepchildren from the point of view of kin
selection theory, see Daly and Wilson, 1999).
- Some focus on the fact that, compared to other species that make nevertheless use of
social learning, such as other great apes, humans are faithful copiers
- Another possibility is that the above mentioned transmission biases provide a way to
repeatedly encounter the same behavior, supplying redundancy to the process of cultural
transmission
- Finally, another option yet is provided by epistemic technologies (Sterelny, 2006), i.e.,
modifications of the external environment that improve individuals' cognitive abilities, in
this case specifically related to facilitate transmission, including extensive apprenticeship
or practice.

5. Contemporary digital environment

- When put into perspective, the new phenomena that characterize our digital age appear to
have their roots in deeper psychological and historical dynamics.
- The spread of massive digital misinformation, for example, is considered one of the most
worrying contemporary global risks by the World Economic Forum8.
- Models that explicitly address the spread of misinformation in social networks could
greatly benefit of the inclusion of the knowledge developed in cultural evolution.
- The transmission chain experiments show that certain kinds of information, related for
example to gossip or disgust, are more likely to spread than others.
- How these, and others, predispositions to be influenced in cultural transmission interact
with the novel characteristics of digital media (such as high fidelity of transmission,
speed, etc.) is material for future studies.
- Another worrying phenomenon associated to digital, in particular social, media, that is,
the formation of echo chambers. The term “echo chambers” describes the fact that
individuals tend, in social media, to associate in communities of like-minded people, and
they are thus repeatedly exposed to the same kind of information (e.g., a political
ideology) and, especially, they are not exposed to information that could counterbalance
 it. More concerning, it has been suggested that groups of like-minded people tend to
produce opinions that are not an “average” of the opinions of the members of the groups,
but their radical version, according to a phenomenon called “group polarization”
(Sunstein, 2002).
- A study of Twitter accounts from Germany, Spain, and the United States, found that the
usage of social media decreases political polarization, arguing that social media contains
more weak ties (i.e., acquaintances or occasional contacts as opposed to close friends or
family) with respect to offline networks.
- In another example, Shore et al. (2016) found that Twitter users post links that are, on
average, more moderate than the links they receive in their feed, and that the perception
of polarization at global level is due to the activity of a core of few, but more active,
extremist users.
- Individuals preferentially copy from others similar to them. This has been particularly
studied for the arbitrary signals that mark ethnic groups membership. As in the case of
prestige bias, or popularity bias, there are reasons to think that a self-similarity bias is an
adaptive strategy. The logic is that people of the same group are more likely to live in
similar situations, and thus to share the same challenges (Henrich, 2016). One may thus
wonder whether or not social media are amplifying the effects of the similarity bias with
respect to offline interactions. How polarized are groups of offline friends or coworkers?
And what about traditional, broadcast, media?

Cultural evolution is a mature field that could give its contribution to the exam of contemporary
cultural phenomena. The digitalization of many instances of cultural transmission seems both
relevant for our society and suitable for the theoretical and methodological tools that cultural
evolutionists have developed. More empirical and modeling works are needed for this task, and
possibly the suggestions sketched here may provide some guidance.