Jagiello Robert, Heyes Cecilia, Whitehouse Harvey
Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PE,
All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK
Behav Brain Sci. 2022 Feb 10;45:e249. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X22000383.
Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel "cultural action framework" bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework.
文化进化既依赖于创新（通过偶然或设计创造新的文化变体），也依赖于高保真传播（它保存我们积累的知识并允许规范性惯例的存储）。我们需要的是一个涵盖这两个维度的总体理论，明确其中涉及的心理动机和机制。文化进化的双焦点立场理论（BST）提出，创新变革与稳定传统的共存源于我们在社会学习和传播过程中灵活采取不同动机立场的能力。我们认为，在文化传播中采用工具性立场和仪式性立场的方式会影响复制保真度的性质和程度，进而也会影响随着时间推移在群体层面上文化传播和稳定的模式。BST为解释其他看似不同的研究领域的发现创造了一个统一框架，这些领域包括社会学习、累积文化、过度模仿和仪式表演。我们讨论了BST对于竞争性副产品解释的影响，这些解释认为忠实复制仅仅是工具性学习和行动解析的副作用。我们还提出了一个新颖的“文化行动框架”，揭示了行为生态学家和进化心理学家相对忽视的社会学习方面，并为该主题的未来研究制定了路线图。BST框架在一个全面的进化框架内，为累积文化变化、选择和传播的认知基础提供了新的视角。
