Whiten Andrew
University of St Andrews(UK).
Span J Psychol. 2017 Jan 9;19:E98. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2016.99.
The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes has become a flourishing field. Applying the 'comparative method' to such phenomena allows us to exploit the good fortunate we have in being able to study them in satisfying detail in our living primate relatives, using the results to reconstruct the cultural cognition of the ancestral forms we share with these species. Here I offer an overview of principal discoveries in recent years, organized through a developing scheme that targets three main dimensions of culture: the patterning of culturally transmitted traditions in time and space; the underlying social learning processes; and the particular behavioral and psychological contents of cultures. I focus on a comparison between humans, particularly children, and our closest primate relative the chimpanzee, for which we now have much the richest database of relevant observational and experimental findings. Commonalities across these sister-species can be identified in each of the three dimensions listed above and in several subcategories within them, but the comparisons also highlight the major contrasts in the nature of culture that have evolved between ourselves and closest primate relatives.
社会学习及各类文化进程的比较与进化分析已成为一个蓬勃发展的领域。将“比较方法”应用于此类现象，使我们能够利用得天独厚的条件，通过对现存灵长类近亲进行详尽研究，依据研究结果重构我们与这些物种共有的祖先形态的文化认知。在此，我将概述近年来的主要发现，这些发现按照一个不断发展的框架进行组织，该框架针对文化的三个主要维度：文化传承传统在时间和空间上的模式；潜在的社会学习过程；以及文化的特定行为和心理内容。我着重比较人类，尤其是儿童，与我们最亲近的灵长类近亲黑猩猩，目前我们拥有关于黑猩猩的极为丰富的相关观察和实验结果数据库。在上述三个维度及其若干子类别中，都能发现这两个姊妹物种之间的共性，但这些比较也凸显了我们人类与最亲近的灵长类近亲之间在文化本质上已进化形成的主要差异。
