Joseph Henrich

“Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith, the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading.”

“The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque. An individual cannot readily infer their functions into relationships or importance.”

“They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques.”

“The processing techniques, however, were not readily or consistently regenerated. Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa.”

“Often, most or all of the people skilled in deploying such adaptive practices do not understand how or why they work, or even that they do anything at all.”

“Cantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.”

“Not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.”

“If people came to understand that bird augury or bone divination didn't actually predict the future, the practice would probably be dropped”

“The device or technology pre-existed the development of any causal understanding, but, by existing, such cultural products opened a window on the world that facilitated the development of an improved causal understanding.”

“That is, for much of human history until recently, cumulative cultural evolution drove the emergence of deeper causal understandings much more than causal understanding drove cultural evolution.”

“humans reliably develop emotions and motivations to seek out particularly skilled, successful, and knowledgeable models, and then are willing to pay deference to those models in order to gain their cooperation”

“Without some form of deference, prestigious individuals have little incentive to allow unrelated learners to be with them, and would not be inclined to provide any preferential access to their skills, strategies, or know-how.”

“Individuals who receive this kind of attention, imitation, and deference are prestigious, even if they turn out not to be very knowledgeable or skilled.”

“A naive learner can't tell all the causal links between an individual's practices and his success.”

“This, if in doubt, copy-it heuristic is one of the reasons why success in one domain converts to influence across a broad range of domains.”

“Creating cooperation here, and enhancing everyone's profits, depended crucially on the high-prestige player going first.”

“All these experiments indicate that prestige can be harnessed to foster cooperation if the organization or institution is structured with an understanding of prestige.”

“Age is only a good proxy if the world faced by the new generation is pretty similar to that faced by the oldest generation.”

“In fact, the faster things change, the younger and younger the best and most competent models get.”

“Second, social norms will tend to remain stable even when they help neither the group nor the individual. In fact, cultural evolution can produce sticky social norms that are bad for everyone.”

“These norms could be stand-alone social rules, like putting the fork on the left, but the fact that they tap our evolved incest psychology probably makes them easier to learn, internalize, and enforce on others.”

“It seemed that they understood that innate incest aversion was prophylactic so chatting was very unlikely to lead to sex However, for classificatory siblings, the only effective prophylactic was the continuous monitoring and potential wrath of the community.”

“That means that about three-quarters of band relationships are based on something besides genetic relatedness.”

“Meanwhile, cases of violations followed by a long period when nothing bad happens will tend to be missed or forgotten, unless people keep and check accurate records.”

“Older Urunda had themselves noticed the power of their rituals for social bonding, though they couldn't explain how or why the ritual worked, and they certainly knew of no one who had designed the protocol.”

“Taken together ritual and final relationships, both of which are culturally constructed and non-existent in primates or other animals, explain much more about the patterns of association, cooperation, helping, and sharing, than blood ties.”

“the vast tribal social networks that mobile hunter-gatherers rely on, for example, in times of drought and war, are largely constituted and nourished by social norms of various types, including those related to rituals, marriage, and exchange.”

“Yet few, if any, adherents to these norms understand the design or implicit function of their institutions.”

“Over time, intergroup competition can aggregate and assemble packages of social norms that more effectively promote such success, and these packages will include social norms related to cooperation, helping, sharing, and maintaining internal harmony.”

“Over time, the more successful groups will expand through immigration, whereas other groups will contract through emigration.”

“This causes social norms, including ideas, beliefs, practices, for example rituals, and motivations, to flow via cultural transmission from more successful groups to less successful groups.”

“There is a substantial amount of cultural flow that has nothing to do with success. For example, hairstyles and music preferences.”

“an epidemic hit this population of hunters and selectively killed off many of its oldest and most knowledgeable members.”

“neither the older generation nor an entirely new generation responded to mother necessity by devising kayaks, leasers, compound bows, or long tunnel entrances.”

“they immediately readopted all the missing know-how once they had been reconnected to the broader Inuit collective brain”

“The average skill of each generation did not increase when people could learn from only one teacher.”

“In the final generation, the least skilled person in the five-model treatment was superior to the most skilled person in the one-model treatment.”

“by acquiring distinct elements from different people, learners can create innovations without inventions.”

“Cumulative cultural evolution has to fight against this force, and is best able to do so in larger populations that are highly socially interconnected.”

“By isolating Tasmanians for eight to ten millennia, the rising seas cut them off from the vast social networks of Australia, suddenly shrinking their collective brains.”

“When learners could access only one model, knot-tying skills plummeted rapidly relative to those who could access five models.”