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What Are Group Level Traits and How Do They Evolve?

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Abstract

Cultural traits are seldom atomic, are distributed over multiple social domains, and undergo differential selection. This makes it important to study the nature and evolution of these traits from a global viewpoint. This paper considers group level cultural traits—what sort of traits are there, how do they evolve, and what is the relationship between cultural traits and their representation in individual worldviews. While not providing a concise theory, important aspects of cultural traits are elaborated and directions of further research indicated. Group level traits arising from individual biological traits are distinguished from those that are intrinsic to a group. The latter are formative of individual worldviews and are emotionally salient for group members. Children are saturated with culture from birth, it provides the scaffolding for their developing worldviews. Affective links between cultural ideas, social behavior, and material elements of culture develop so that the affordances in perceived situations carry biases influencing behavior toward culturally acceptable responses. Intrinsic traits are not, however, acted on directly by group level selection; rather, this selection acts on the behavior of group members and only indirectly on intrinsic cultural ideas through social exchange processes between group members.

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Notes

  1. The analogy to a virus is only partial. The genetic information in a virus instructs a host cell to replicate copies of the virus, including its genetic code. Memes do not contain the information that instructs a host to replicate the meme, transmission depends on whether the host decides to repeat the meme.

  2. Also called self-other reorganization (Gabora 2021).

  3. This does not imply that cultural solutions will always be adaptive.

  4. The problems arising from this definition of group fitness have been discussed in Sect. 1.

  5. For example, recent rule changes by the National Football League in the United States in order to reduce the chance of concussion.

  6. The United Society of Believers in Christs Second Appearing, known as the Shakers, practiced celibacy. As of 2017 there were only two Shakers remaining in the world (Smithsonian Magazine January 6, 2017).

  7. As, for example, in the 1964 statement by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description “hard-core pornography,” and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”.

  8. This is the point of the Socratic claim that virtue cannot be taught. When Socrates raised questions on the nature of justice his goal was not to define justice, it was to become just. He was attempting to provoke internalization of the indefinable “thing in itself,” the fifth level of knowledge alluded to in Plato’s Seventh Letter.

  9. A cultural ideal of cooperation has little effect if group member are not willing to support it with behavior.

  10. In a superficial example, what led to the popularity of some dance fads, such as the Charleston or the Twist, while others (the Funky Robot, the Urkel) failed to get off the ground? More seriously, why do some conspiracy theories propagate while others do not?

  11. Gabora uses the term autocatalytic food sets.

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    Burton Voorhees

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Voorhees, B. What Are Group Level Traits and How Do They Evolve?. Integr. psych. behav. 57, 913–936 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-022-09689-1

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