Zeng, Rong, and Patricia M Greenfield. “
Cultural evolution over the last 40 years in China: Using the Google Ngram Viewer to study implications of social and political change for cultural values.”
International journal of psychology 50, no. 1 (2015): 47–55.
AbstractChinese people have held collectivistic values such as obligation, giving to other people, obedience and sacrifice of personal interests for thousands of years. In recent decades, China has undergone rapid economic development and urbanisation. This study investigates changing cultural values in China from 1970 to 2008 and the relationship of changing values to ecological shifts. The conceptual framework for the study was Greenfield's (2009) theory of social change and human development. Changing frequencies of contrasting Chinese words indexing individualistic or collectivistic values show that values shift along with ecological changes (urbanisation, economic development and enrollment in higher education), thereby adapting to current sociodemographic contexts. Words indexing adaptive individualistic values increased in frequency between 1970 and 2008. In contrast, words indexing less adaptive collectivistic values either decreased in frequency in this same period of time or else rose more slowly than words indexing contrasting individualistic values.
PDF Weinstock, Michael, Maysam Ganayiem, Rana Igbaryia, Adriana M Manago, and Patricia M Greenfield. “
Societal Change and Values in Arab Communities in Israel: Intergenerational and Rural–Urban Comparisons.”
Journal of cross-cultural psychology 46, no. 1 (2015): 19–38.
AbstractThis study tested and extended Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to adolescent development in Arab communities in Israel undergoing rapid social change. The theory views sociodemographic changes—such as contact with an ethnically diverse urban setting and spread of technology—as driving changes in cultural values. In one research design, we compared three generations, high school girls, their mothers, and their grandmothers, in their responses to value-assessment scenarios. In a second research design, we compared girls going to high school in an ethnically diverse city with girls going to school in a village. As predicted by the theory, a t test and ANOVA revealed that both urban life and membership in the youngest generation were significantly related to more individualistic and gender-egalitarian values. Regression analysis and a bootstrapping mediation analysis showed that the mechanism of change in both cases was possession of mobile technologies.
PDF Chudek, Maciej., Michael Muthukrishna, and Joseph Henrich. “
Cultural Evolution.” In
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology,
edited by David M. Buss. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. John Wiley and Sons, 2015.
PDF Henrich, Joseph.
The Secret of Our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smart. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Publisher's VersionAbstractHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often unable to solve basic problems, like obtaining food, building shelters or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced innovative technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into environments across the globe. What has enabled us to dominate such a vast range of environments, more than any other species? The Secret of Our Success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—in the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and to learn from one another.
Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers, neuroscientists, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species’ genetic evolution, and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy and psychology in crucial ways. Further on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw and writing. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and that this unique culture-gene interaction has propelled our species on a unique evolutionary trajectory.
Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species striking uniqueness and odd peculiarities.
Visit the book website here.
Salali, Gul Deniz, Myriam Juda, and Joseph Henrich. “
Transmission and development of costly punishment in children.”
Evolution and Human Behavior 36 (2015): 86-94.
AbstractEvolutionary theorists argue that cultural evolution has harnessed various aspects of our evolved psychology to create a variety of different mechanisms for sustaining social norms, including those related to large-scale cooperation. One of these mechanisms, costly punishment, has emerged in experiments as an effective means to sustain cooperation in some societies. If this view is correct, individuals' willingness to engage in the costly punishment of norm violators should be culturally transmittable, and applicable to both prosocial and anti-social behaviors (to any social norm). Since much existing work shows that norm-based prosocial behavior in experiments develops substantially during early and middle childhood, we tested 245 3- to 8-year olds in a simplified third party punishment game to investigate whether children would imitate a model's decision to punish, at a personal cost, both unequal and equal offers. Our study showed that children, regardless of their age, imitate the costly punishment of both equal and unequal offers, and the rates of imitation increase (not decrease) with age. However, only older children imitate not-punishing for both equal and unequal offers. These findings highlight the potential role of cultural transmission in the stabilization or de-stabilization of costly punishment in a population.
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