Culture and history and religion and science [are] different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.

—Julian Jaynes (1920-97), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976, p. 9).

Our depiction of human beings up to this point is already fairly complex, but it is a one-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional beings. Every individual has three primary psychological dimensions—the universal, the individual, and the cultural. So far we have focused on the universal dimension—the evolved characteristics shared by all human beings. A second dimension of the person is the individual dimension: a person’s personality, values, attitudes, beliefs that result from that person’s unique genetic makeup and life experiences and that help distinguish him or her from all others.

The third dimension is the cultural, which includes those aspects of each person that have been shaped by the particular culture within which she or he was socialized and that he or she currently inhabits. To round out our psychological depiction of humankind, we now turn to this profoundly influential aspect of human life—the cultural dimension which makes us uniquely cultural animals.

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The scheme of things is a system of order. . . . It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having taken place. It comes with one’s mother’s milk, is chanted in school, proclaimed from the White House, is insinuated by television, validated at Harvard. Like the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, becomes simply reality, the way things are.

—Allen Wheelis (1915–2007), The Scheme of Things (1980, p. 69)

Consider the present moment, right now, as you read this sentence. This is a moment of your conscious experience of life. It is a moment you will never experience again (perhaps thankfully). Now it’s gone, and you are on to another fleeting moment. Your conscious life consists of a continual sequence of such moments, interspersed with sleep, until your death. But is that generally how you conceive of time? Probably not.

Instead, we think of time in terms of minutes, hours, days, years, and so forth. Perhaps right now it’s 9:00 p.m. Well, there is another 9:00 p.m. every day. And perhaps it’s Tuesday—there’ll be another one next week, and maybe you make a plan to meet up with a friend by saying, “See you next Tuesday.” This is our culture at work, giving people a convenient and comforting scaffolding for their stream of consciousness. Someone raised in a different culture may experience time in a distinctly different manner. People in India, for example, recognize elaborate cosmic cycles called yugas which consist of 12,000-year mahayugas; there are a thousand mahayugas in a kalpa and 14 kalpas in a manvantara, after which a new yuga is initiated (Eliade, 1959). Take away culture, and there is no “next Tuesday” or “next kalpa”—merely a sequence of lived moments. This is just one of many basic ways that culture determines how we think about the world in our day-to-day lives.

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The Common yet Distinctive Elements of Culture

All cultures have certain basic elements, and yet each culture’s version of these features is unique. The similarities among cultures are not surprising, given that, as we have noted, people everywhere have the same basic motivations, emotions, and cognitive capabilities, and must contend with the same basic realities of life on this planet. At the same time, different groups inhabit different physical environments and different cultural histories. As a result, each culture’s version of the basic elements is unique. These differences are what make meeting and learning about various groups of people from other parts of the world so interesting but also sometimes confusing or disturbing. Let’s briefly consider each of these elements and how they are similar and different across cultures.

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Beliefs are accepted ideas about some aspect of reality. The idea that the earth revolves around the sun is a belief. Within a culture, many beliefs are virtually never disputed; these ideas are so unquestioned that they are often referred to as cultural truisms. In Western cultures, the aforementioned sun-earth relationship is one; that brushing your teeth is good for you is another (McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961). Some beliefs seem self-evidently true to one culture but may be vigorously disputed or rejected outright in another. For example, in some cultures, belief in an afterlife is widely accepted, whereas in others, it is not.

Beliefs are generally taken on faith and based on learning from parents, teachers, and other cultural authorities rather than being derived through specific personal experience. After all, if we relied only on personal experience, all but a few scientists and astronauts would believe that the sun revolves around the earth, as the vast majority of people once did. Similarly, how many people have seen the supposed proof that brushing teeth is good for us? The fact that we hold these and thousands of other beliefs on faith is a perfect example of how culture helps people in a group to create a shared sense of reality.

Members of a culture tend to share similar attitudes, which are preferences, likes and dislikes, and opinions about what is good and bad. Attitudes are closely linked to beliefs, but they refer more specifically to how people evaluate something as good or bad. For example, a group of people may share the belief that abortion is legal in the United States, but their attitude toward the legalization of abortion could be favorable or unfavorable.

A culture’s values reflect its members’ guiding principles and shared goals. Although cultures differ in their values, Shalom Schwartz and colleagues (e.g., Schwartz, 1992) has shown that cultures around the world recognize 10 core values (Table 2.1). These values can be viewed as stemming from the two basic motivational orientations mentioned earlier in this chapter: security and growth. The values of security, tradition, conformity, benevolence, and universalism reflect a desire to sustain safety, order, harmony, meaning, connection, and approval. In contrast, the values of self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, and power involve freedom, choice, excitement, enjoyment, accomplishment, and influence over others.

Across over 50 different cultures there is remarkable agreement in the importance people give each of these value types. Benevolence, the desire to be a good person ranked first; self-direction, the desire for personal freedom, and universalism, the desire for a just, meaningful, and peaceful world, were a close second and third. Presumably, the high level of consensus regarding these values reflects their psychological importance in serving the basic motives of security and growth. Nevertheless, cross-cultural differences in values also play an important role in various aspects of life (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz et al., 2013).

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Values have a broad influence in a wide range of situations; in contrast, norms are shared beliefs about what is appropriate or expected behavior in particular situations. For example, many cultures have highly specific norms regarding who sits where during a social gathering, who sits down first, and who passes through a door first. In every culture, some situations involve very clear norms. In the United States, court proceedings and religious services are examples of such situations. These are known as strong situations, because norms strongly influence and constrain behavioral options (Mischel, 1977). In contrast, weak situations involve norms that are less clear or strict, so that almost anything goes. In the United States, hanging around with your friends would be an example of a relatively weak situation.

Morals are beliefs about what good and bad behavior is. Three basic moral domains, abbreviated as CAD, have been proposed (Shweder et al., 1997). Community morals concern social role obligations, respect for authority, and loyalty to the group. Autonomy morals concern harming other individuals or infringing on their rights and freedoms. Divinity morals pertain to what is considered sacred and pure in the culture. Transgressions against each of these morals are associated with distinct emotions: Violations of community morals usually evoke feelings of contempt; violations of autonomy morals evoke anger; and violations of divinity morals evoke disgust (Rozin et al., 1999).

All cultures specify community, autonomy, and divinity morals but vary in the extent to which they emphasize each moral domain. A culture that places high value on conformity (e.g., China) is likely to emphasize morals concerning community; a culture that values self-direction highly (e.g., the United States) is likely to emphasize morals concerning autonomy; and a culture that highly values tradition (e.g., Yemen) is likely to emphasize morals concerning divinity (Shweder et al., 1997). Each culture’s laws and prescribed punishments are likely to reflect these value-driven moral emphases.

Jonathan Haidt and colleagues (e.g., Haidt & Kesebir, 2010) more recently developed moral foundations theory by expanding Shweder’s CAD to five basic moral domains: harm/care and fairness/reciprocity (based on autonomy); in-group/loyalty and authority/respect (based on community), and purity/sanctity (based on divinity). They have found that in the United States, individuals near the liberal end of the political spectrum focus mainly on harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, whereas those near the conservative end emphasize all five moral domains equally (FIGURE 2.6; Graham et al., 2009).

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Customs are specific patterns or styles of dress, speech, and behavior that, within a given culture, are deemed appropriate in particular contexts (FIGURE 2.7). For example, in the United States, it is customary to clap after watching actors perform an enjoyable play; in Japan it is customary to burp after an enjoyable meal. In Navajo culture, the first person who sees a baby smile, which typically doesn’t happen until about six weeks after birth, is expected to throw a party to celebrate it. It is interesting that people are just as likely to try to avoid that honor as to try to be the lucky host: customs are widely followed, but not always happily.

All cultures have social roles, positions within a group that entail specific ways of acting and dividing labor, responsibility, and resources. The enactor of the role is someone who has met the culture’s requirements for taking on that role and has implicitly or explicitly agreed to do so. He or she usually communicates that role through certain forms of conduct, appearance, and demeanor that are recognized by other group members. Some roles, such as those defined by gender, can inform the person’s thought and action across a very wide range of situations. Other roles, such as orchestra conductor, dictate how a person acts in a particular situation. Roles help define the self-concept. For example, a person’s self-definition may begin, “I am an American citizen, a mother, and a professor.” The privileges, responsibilities, and norms of a social role may be flexible or rigid. In the United States, the role of parent allows a certain latitude in how a person treats a child as long as that person takes care of the child’s basic needs.

Cultural symbols represent either the culture as a whole or beliefs or values prevalent in the culture. In cultures where members share a nationality, flags are often used to symbolize the culture’s meaning, history, and values. Cultures defined around religious beliefs often create and recognize sacred symbols and artifacts, such as crucifixes and masks. Because symbols are seen as embodiments of cherished beliefs, ideals, and other aspects of cultural identity, they often are treated with great care, and in some cases only by select individuals. As a demonstration, try seeing if you can borrow the original U.S. Constitution for the weekend.

Cultural symbols are central aspects of a culture’s rituals, which are patterns of actions performed in particular contexts that reinforce cultural beliefs, values, and morals, and that often signal a change associated with the end of or beginning of something of biological, historical, or cultural significance (e.g., birth, puberty, marriage, the founding of one’s nation, annual holidays). Funerals, weddings, tea ceremonies, puberty-related ceremonies (e.g., confirmations, bar and bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras), birthday parties, and bridal showers are typical rituals. Another common ritual in universities and colleges is the commencement ceremony (FIGURE 2.8).

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Culture provides a uniquely advantageous means for adapting to environmental change. Cultural innovations can accumulate far more rapidly than genetic mutations, and good ideas can spread horizontally across populations as well as vertically between generations. This strategy of cultural adaptation, more than anything else, has enabled our species to transform itself from a relatively insignificant large African mammal to the dominant life form on Earth.

— Richard Klein, The Dawn of Human Culture (2002, p. 26).

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Culture is a creative adaptation that a group develops to serve its needs and desires in its particular environment. According to the anthropologist Weston La Barre (1954), cultural evolution can occur quickly, as a group develops new technologies and revises belief systems to provide flexible adaptation in meeting the demands of a changing environment. Through such cultural evolution, people can avoid getting locked into specific environmental niches. This capacity is the reason humans can be found almost everywhere on our planet and, over the last few decades, even in outer space and on the moon. Indeed, cultures can change within a single generation and sometimes almost virtually overnight. Just think of how much music, fashion, politics, and social norms have changed in the very few years that you’ve been alive. It seems unimaginable, but when your parents were growing up, there was no Internet! How did people back then get information and music? How did they socialize?

Cultural Diffusion: Spreading the Word

Once a component of culture develops, it is picked up and used by others. Generally, the more adaptive it is, the more readily it spreads. The transfer of inventions, knowledge, and ideas from one culture to another, a process that the anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936) labeled cultural diffusion, is made possible by the human capacity for communication and learning, combined with the urge to explore and grow. This diffusion often occurs through friendly contact, business and trade, mass communication, and immigration, but also commonly results from conquest and colonization. For example, many aspects of Roman culture were diffused throughout Europe as the Roman empire spread its domination across Europe and beyond, often by means of extreme violence.

Through cultural diffusion, a culture doesn’t have to depend solely on the ingenuity of its own members to meet the adaptive challenges of the environment; rather, it can benefit from knowledge, skills, and inventions developed by other cultures. For example, when the inhabitants of Tasmania arrived there over 20,000 years ago, they had a culture that was equivalent to that of Europe at the time in its material development. But because the Tasmanians were isolated from outside influence, by the time Europeans first visited them in the eighteenth century, European culture was far more technologically advanced (Linton, 1936). Europe’s location and sea-travel-friendly coastlines allowed its evolving cultures to benefit extensively from cultural diffusion in terms of technological innovation and development (Diamond & Bellwood, 2003).

Historical examples of ideas that have diffused in this manner include the belief in one deity (monotheism), knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun, and the idea that women should have equal rights with men. And the easier travel and communication became around the globe, the more quickly cultural diffusion occurred. Under such conditions, inventions are especially likely to spread rapidly, as can be seen with radio, television, computers, the Internet, and cell phones.

Of course, as this diffusion occurs, other cultures typically adapt these influences for their own purposes. When Marco Polo brought the technology for making pasta back from the Far East, the Italians developed their own forms and uses for it; those of us who enjoy Italian restaurants are glad of that. But these modifications are not always so unambiguously beneficial. The Internet has led to development of web sites devoted to things such as music and comic books in some cultures, but it has led to web sites devoted to racism and spreading terrorism in others.

An oft-overlooked consequence of cultural diffusion is that all but the most isolated and technologically primitive of cultures are actually hybrid products of many cultures (Linton, 1936). To mention a few examples: Americans often think of horses and cows as prototypical symbols of the American West, but they were first domesticated in Southwest Asia. Windmills and wooden shoes, so closely associated with Holland, originally appeared in Persia (now Iran). The use of eggs to symbolize the Christian Easter celebration dates back to pagan fertility ceremonies as well as to Egyptian traditions 5,000 years ago. The general point is that much of what people consider central characteristics of their own culture are actually elements borrowed from other cultures and subsequently elaborated on. Thus, cultures are amazingly complex and useful adaptations, best viewed as cumulative collaborative products of the ingenuity of the entire human species, and hence should be sources of pride for us all rather than only for members of particular groups.

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Cultural Transmission

How do we do it? Cultural innovation and diffusion across generations requires a specific kind of social interaction between experienced teachers and youngsters amenable to learning by formal instruction or imitation. The developmental psychologist Peter Hobson (2004) makes a strong case for the role of education as a defining feature of our species. Although other animals, especially higher primates, clearly learn a great deal by observing the behavior of others, human adults routinely engage in cultural transmission: explicit efforts to teach children knowledge and skills, largely with the help of language. And human children, regardless of the extent of their formal schooling, spend a considerable proportion of their early years as beneficiaries of direct efforts to inculcate them into the cultural universe of their compatriots.