Chapter 2:Culture and human nature. Large brain requires an enormous amount of energy, having smaller muscles allowed humans to evolve larger more resource-intensive brain. Do animals have culture? Culture refers to some kind of symbolic coding, set of signals, icons, and words that indicate something else most member of the culture recognize. Yes., human are the only species. Culture as information acquired through social leaning from members of one's own species. No. Human frequently learn new information from each other, and often only a single exposure Cultural learning; Biases in imitation. Humans are selective in whom they imitate. Prestige bias: People are trying to imitate that those individuals who have skills and respected by others. Copy people that seem to be an expert on this field. Similarity Bias: Choosing whom to imitate and learn from based on the target's similarity to themselves. Copying another's action serves to demonstrates your group identity and affiliation. Conformist transmission: a tendency to learn from people who are engaging in behaviors that are more common compared with others. Sensitive to the most common behavior. ??????,???? ???????? The unusually sophisticated cultural learning skills of humans also rest on three key cognitive capacities, the ability to consider the perspective of others, the ability to communicate using language, and the motivation to share their experiences. Mentalizing and perspective taking able to take on the perspective of those others by considering their intention, goal, preferences, and strategies. Mentalizing Imitative learning: In which the learner internalizes something of the model's goals and behavioral strategies. Emulative learning: learner focuses on the environmental events involved, such as how the use of one object could potentially cause changes in the state of the environment. Only focusing on the events that happen around the model. ????,????????????????Get food out of the box, not how people get the food out. Chimpanzees and other primates tend to solve problems with emulative learning rather than imitative learning. Human social learning appears to be more imitative. They internalize the model's goals and behavioral strategies. Chimp social learning to be more emulative, focus on the environmental events that are involved and not the model's goals and behavioral (and intention) strategies. Key benefit of Imitative learning: Imitative learning allows for a faithful and high-fidelity reproduction of target behavior. New cultural information cannot only be accurately reproduced, it can also be improved. This allows for cultural
accumulation. Language: Language allows ideas to be communicated without having to be visually demonstrated. Language enables people to convey their beliefs, intentions, and complex thoughts, facilitating the coordination of behavior among individuals living in groups. Cultural ideas are most successfully transmitted through language. Sharing experience: Human are motivated to share their experience and goals with others. Cumulative cultural evolution: Cultural info grows in complexity, and often in usefulness, over time (ratchet effect). Population and Size interconnection: The reason cultural accumulation has been increasing at a progressively rapid pace is that human population continues to grow. The bigger the group of people, the better the cultural information