Cultural learning is the way a group of people or animals within a
society
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Socie ...
or
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...
tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles are greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between
Eastern
Eastern may refer to:
Transportation
*China Eastern Airlines, a current Chinese airline based in Shanghai
*Eastern Air, former name of Zambia Skyways
*Eastern Air Lines, a defunct American airline that operated from 1926 to 1991
*Eastern Air Li ...
and
Western culture
Leonardo da Vinci's ''Vitruvian Man''. Based on the correlations of ideal Body proportions">human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise ''De architectura''.
image:Plato Pio-Cle ...
s. Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded. These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and
endemic pathogens.
Cultural evolution
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation a ...
, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics.
Overview
Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to do independently over the course of their lifetimes. Cultural learning is believed to be particularly important for humans. Humans are weaned at an early age compared to the emergence of
adult dentition
Permanent teeth or adult teeth are the second set of teeth formed in diphyodont mammals. In humans and old world simians, there are thirty-two permanent teeth, consisting of six maxillary and six mandibular molars, four maxillary and four mandibu ...
. The immaturity of dentition and the digestive system, the time required for growth of the brain, and the rapid skeletal growth needed for the young to reach adult height and strength mean that children have special digestive needs and are dependent on adults for a long period of time. This time of dependence also allows time for cultural learning to occur before passage into adulthood.
On the basis of cultural learning, people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They understand and apply specific systems of
symbolic meaning
In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules.
The alphabet of a formal language consists of symb ...
. Cultures have been compared to sets of
control mechanisms, plans, recipes, rules, or instructions. Cultural differences have been found in academic motivation, achievement, learning style, conformity, and compliance. Cultural learning is dependent on innovation, or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behaviour of others. Animals that are able to solve problems and imitate the behaviour of others are therefore able to transmit information across generations.
Cass Sunstein
Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, law and behavioral economics. He is also ''The New York Times'' best-selling author of ...
described in 2007 how
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
moves us past the rigid limits of socialist planning that
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek ( , ; 8 May 189923 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian–British economist, legal theorist and philosopher who is best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Haye ...
attacked on the grounds that "no planner could possibly obtain the dispersed bits of information held by individual members of society. Hayek insisted that the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert."
Examples
An example of cultural transmission can be seen in post-World War II
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
during the American
occupation of the country. There were political, economic, and social changes in Japan influenced by America.
Some changes include changes to their constitution, reforms, and the consumption of media, which were influenced by American occupiers. The occupation of Japan by the Japanese turned into a strong link between nations. Over time, Japanese culture began to accept American touchstones like jazz and baseball, while Americans were introduced to Japanese cuisine and entertainment.
A modern approach to cultural transmission would be that of the internet. One example would be
millennials
Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the Western demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000 ...
, who "are both products of their culture as well as
influencers
An Internet celebrity (also known as a social media influencer, social media personality, internet personality, or simply influencer) is a celebrity who has acquired or developed their fame and notability through the Internet. The rise of social m ...
." Millennials are often the ones teaching older generations how to navigate the web. The teacher has to accommodate to the learning process of the student, in this case an older generation student, in order to transmit the information fluently and in a manner that is easier to understand. This goes hand in hand with the
Communication Accommodation Theory
Communication accommodation theory (CAT) is a theory of communication developed by Howard Giles. This theory concerns "(1) the behavioral changes that people make to attune their communication to their partner, (2) the extent to which people percei ...
, which "elaborates the human tendency to adjust their behaviour while interacting." The end result would be that, with the help of someone else, people are able to share their newly acquired skills among people in their culture, which was not possible before.
Humans also tend to follow "communicative" ways of learning, as seen in a study by Hanna Marno, a researcher at the
International School for Advanced Studies
The International School for Advanced Studies (Italian: ''Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati''; SISSA) is an international, state-supported, post-graduate-education and research institute in Trieste, Italy.
SISSA is active in the ...
. In the study, infants followed an adult's action of pressing a button to light up a lamp based on the adult's "non-verbal (eye contact) and verbal cues."
In non-human animals
Enculturation can also be used to describe the raising of an animal in which the animal acquires traits and skills that would not otherwise be acquired if it were raised by another of its own species.
Cultural learning is dependent on innovation, or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behavior of others. Animals that are able to solve problems and imitate the behavior of others are therefore able to transmit information across generations. A wide variety of
social animals
Sociality is the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups (gregariousness) and form cooperative societies.
Sociality is a survival response to evolutionary pressures. For example, when a mother wasp ...
learn from other members of their group or pack.
Wolves
The wolf (''Canis lupus''; plural, : wolves), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large Canis, canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus, subspecies of ''Canis lupus'' have been reco ...
, for example, learn multiple
hunting strategies
A hunting strategy, or hunting method, is a tactic that is used to target, pursue, and hunt an animal. The hunting strategy that a hunter uses depends mainly on the type of terrain, as well as game being hunted. Climate, local hunting techniques, ...
from the other pack members. A large number of bird species also engage in cultural learning; such learning is critical for the survival of some species.
Dolphins
A dolphin is an aquatic mammal within the infraorder Cetacea. Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (t ...
also pass on knowledge about
tool use
Tool use by animals is a phenomenon in which an animal uses any kind of tool in order to achieve a goal such as acquiring food and water, grooming, defence, communication, recreation or construction. Originally thought to be a skill possessed ...
.
See also
*
Educational anthropology Educational anthropology, or the anthropology of education, is a sub-field of anthropology and is widely associated with the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and later, George Spindler, Solon Kimball, and Dell Hymes, and Jean Lave. It gained attrac ...
*
Intercultural competence
Cultural competence, also known as intercultural competence, is a range of cognitive, affective, and behavioural skills that lead to effective and appropriate communication with people of other cultures.Deardorff, D. K. (2009). ''The Sage handbook ...
*
Intercultural communication principles
Inter-cultural communication principles guide the process of exchanging meaningful and unambiguous information across cultural boundaries, that preserves mutual respect and minimises antagonism. Intercultural communication can be defined simply by ...
*
Socialization
In sociology, socialization or socialisation (see spelling differences) is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultur ...
*
Dual inheritance theory
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: gen ...
References
Inline
General
* van Shaik, Carel P. & Burkart, Judith M. (2011)
"Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence hypothesis" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1008-1016
* Chang, Lei; Mak, Miranda C. K.; Li, Tong; Wu, Bao Pei; Chen, Bin Bin; & Lu, Hui Jing (2011)
"Cultural Adaptations to Environmental Variability: An Evolutionary Account of East–West Differences"(PDF). ''
Educational Psychology Review
''Educational Psychology Review'' is a peer reviewed academic journal on the topic of educational psychology started in 1989, published by Springer Science+Business Media. Between 1999 and 2014, its highest impact factor was 2.83 in 2013, with 20 ...
'', 23(1), 99-129. doi:10.1007/s10648-010-9149-0
* Lehmann, L. L., Feldman, M. W., & Kaeuffer, R. R. (2010). "Cumulative cultural dynamics and the co-evolution of cultural innovation and transmission: an ESS model for panmictic and structured populations". Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 23(11), 2356-2369. doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02096.x
* MacDonald, K. (2007)
"Cross-cultural Comparison of Learning in Human Hunting" Human Nature, 18(4), 386-402. doi:10.1007/s12110-007-9019-8
*
{{Culture
Applied learning
Human communication