Granqvist Pehr
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University , Stockholm, Sweden.
Attach Hum Dev. 2021 Feb;23(1):90-113. doi: 10.1080/14616734.2019.1709086. Epub 2020 Jan 2.
I argue that attachment relationships, and particularly secure ones, are important contexts for social learning and cultural transmission. Bowlby originally treated the attachment-behavioral system as serving only one evolutionary function: protection, via physical proximity. Yet the time is ripe to consider learning, especially social learning, as an additional functional consequence of attachment. Updated accordingly, attachment theory has the potential to serve as a much-needed developmental anchor for models of cultural evolution and gene-culture co-evolution. To support my arguments, I review progress in evolutionary science since Bowlby's lifetime, highlighting the growing recognition of ecological flexibility and the cultural embeddedness of animal behavior. I also review research pointing to a facilitating role of secure attachment relationships for social learning from caregivers among humans. For illustrational purposes, I show how one important aspect of human culture - religion - is culturally transmitted within attachment relationships, and of how the generalization of attachment-related working models biases the cultural transmission of religion from parents to offspring. I end the paper with a call for empirical research to test the role of attachment in cultural transmission beyond religion.
我认为依恋关系，尤其是安全型依恋关系，是社会学习和文化传承的重要背景。鲍尔比最初认为依恋行为系统仅具有一种进化功能：通过身体上的亲近来提供保护。然而，现在是时候将学习，尤其是社会学习，视为依恋的另一种功能性结果了。相应更新后，依恋理论有潜力成为文化进化和基因 - 文化共同进化模型急需的发展基石。为了支持我的观点，我回顾了自鲍尔比时代以来进化科学的进展，强调了对生态灵活性和动物行为文化嵌入性的认识不断增加。我还回顾了相关研究，这些研究指出安全型依恋关系对人类从照顾者那里进行社会学习具有促进作用。为了说明这一点，我展示了人类文化的一个重要方面——宗教——是如何在依恋关系中进行文化传承的，以及与依恋相关的工作模型的泛化如何影响宗教从父母到后代的文化传承。本文最后呼吁进行实证研究，以检验依恋在宗教之外的文化传承中的作用。
