The transmission of culture from one generation to another within a society is known as

Cultural transmission theory

Cultural transmission theory occupies a place in sociology that is just as distinguished as the anomie framework, against which it stands in sharp contrast. Anomie theory portrays society as culturally rather uniform; its members uphold a common set of goals and institutionalized means, though these may be in some temporary disarray. Cultural transmission theory, on the other hand, sees most societies as comprising disparate groups that uphold their own distinctive cultures. When a person conforms to one of those ‘subcultures’, he or she may automatically appear to be a deviant from the perspective of people in most of the other subcultures. To mention only one example, some years ago, hundreds of American followers of a religious fanatic, Jim Jones, committed suicide and murdered their own children at their compound in Guyana, all believing that they would gain immortality by doing so. None of these people were social isolates; all of them were avid conformists to a subculture that was deviant from the standpoint of most nonmembers.

According to cultural transmission theory, the more one is integrated into such a deviant subculture, the more likely one is to live by its standards, even when those standards are antisocial vis-à-vis other groups. Thus the same processes of affiliation and conformity explain how one person may become a terrorist, while his brother or sister becomes a pool shark or stamp collector: by associating with a group of terrorists, billiard players, or stamp collectors, as the case may be.

Cultural Transmission Theory

Cultural transmission theory occupies a place in sociology that is just as distinguished as the anomie framework, against which it stands in sharp contrast. Anomie theory portrays society as culturally rather uniform; its members uphold a common set of goals and institutionalized means, though these may be in some temporary disarray. Cultural transmission theory, on the other hand, sees most societies as comprising disparate groups that uphold their own distinctive cultures. When a person conforms to one of those “subcultures,” he or she may automatically appear to be a deviant from the perspective of people in most of the other subcultures. To mention only one example, some years ago, hundreds of American followers of a religious fanatic, Jim Jones, committed suicide and murdered their own children at their compound in Guyana, all believing that they would gain immortality by doing so. None of these people were social isolates; all of them were avid conformists to a subculture that was deviant from the standpoint of most nonmembers.

According to cultural transmission theory, the more one is integrated into such a deviant subculture, the more likely one is to live by its standards, even when those standards are antisocial vis-a`-vis other groups. Thus the same processes of affiliation and conformity explain how one person may become a terrorist, while his brother or sister becomes a pool shark or stamp collector: by associating with a group of terrorists, billiard players, or stamp collectors, as the case may be.

3.3.2 Immigration and assimilation

The cultural transmission of ethnic and religious traits if often studied, somewhat indirectly, focusing on the behavior of immigrants. The dynamic pattern of cultural and socio-economic integration of immigrants to the receiving country contains evidence of the parental socialization (or lack thereof) to the traits which characterize their origin. Countless ethnographic studies have been produced about the immigrant experience in sociology and anthropology, at least since the photographic documentation about, How the other half lives, in New York, by Jacob Riis in 1890.48 Starting in the late 1950s and 1960s, many of them discredit the view that immigrants naturally assimilate in a melting pot and focus instead on their struggles to socialize children to their ethnic and religious traits.

We concentrate in this survey on econometric studies of the integration pattern of immigrants. A fundamental tool of this analysis are assimilation indexes.49 One such index has been recently proposed by Vigdor (2008). It measures the residual of the probability that an individual is an immigrant, appropriately rescaled from 0 to a 100 (maximal assimilation), when the probability is obtained under a linear probit prediction model. A measure of the speed of assimilation can then be ascertained from the graph in Figure 14, which reports the index as a function of years in the U.S. at different period in time (1900, 1910, 1920, 2006), that is, for different cohort of immigrants.

An extensive analysis of Census data from the point of view of Vigdor's assimilation index indicates that, for instance, immigrants in the U.S. in the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly than immigrants a century ago, even though Mexicans appear to assimilate at a slower rate than other immigrant groups before them.

Other measures of integration are obtained by comparing first and second-generation immigrants to natives of similar demographic and economic characteristics. Borjas (1995), for instance, studies residential segregation in Census 1970 and NLSY data. He documents a large variation in segregation rates across ethnic groups (first generation): e.g., 2.6% for Greeks, 2.2% for Jamaicans, 15.3% for Italians and 22.6% for Mexicans in the 1970 Census. Similarly, he documents a large variation in first-second generation differences in segregation rates: Italians go from 15.3% to 12.1%, Mexicans from 22.6% to 18.1%, while Cubans from 21.3% to 4.7%.

More formally, the integration literature typically relies on waves of cross sectional data (like e.g., Census data) to construct synthetic cohorts and distinguish integration from the effects of age at migration and cohort.50 Consider a general trait yi of an individual i in a fixed country j (the destination country). Let Xi represent individual specific controls and let Ik be a dummy taking value 1 if the individual is an immigrant from country of origin k (and 0 for natives). The regression

yi=β0+β1 Xi+∑kIk(δk+ γ1,kageatmigration+γ2,kyearofmigration++γ3,klengthofstay)+ɛi

identifies the speed of integration of immigrants from country k with γ3,k, the coefficient of length of stay.51 Furthermore, when data to distinguish second and third generation immigrants are available, let Ik be a first generation dummy, that is, 1 if the individual is a first generation immigrant from country of origin k (and 0 for second generation and natives); and let IIk be a second generation dummy, 1 if the individual is a second generation immigrant from country of origin k (and 0 otherwise).52 In this case, the regression is:

yi=β0+β1X i+∑k(δk+γ1,kageatmigration+γ2,kyearofmigration++γ3,klengthofstay)Ik+ɛi+∑ kθkIIk

and θk identifies the second generation effect.

Following some variant of this methodology, measures of economic integration for the U.S. and Canada have been constructed using earnings, (log) wage rates, skills (see e.g., LaLonde and Topel, 1997 and Borjas, 1999, for surveys). Other measures of assimilation, which focus more on cultural dimensions, have been constructed using intermarriage rates (Pagnini and Morgan, 1990; Meng and Gregory (2005); Bisin, Patacchini, Verdier, Zenou, 2008), or English proficiency (see Chiswick and Miller, 1992), ethnically-revealing names (Arai, Besancenot, Huynh, and Skalli, 2009), civic participation (Aleksynska, 2007), ethnic job specialization (Mandorff, 2005), self-reported measures in survey data (Dustmann, 1996; Bisin, Patacchini, Verdier, Zenou, 2008; Manning and Roy, 2009).

A recent empirical literature has studied the behavior of immigrants with a different perspective. This literature, which goes by the name of epidemiological approach,53 is motivated as an attempt to isolate cultural traits of the origin countries, which affect the behavior of immigrants (including second-generation immigrants) in the destination countries. In this sense, the literature provides evidence that culture matters. In the process of documenting that culture matters, however, these studies indirectly measure the persistence of ethnic and religious traits, which immigrants maintain from their original backgrounds.

Consider a sample of individuals born in country j, including natives and second-generation immigrants from country of origin k. Consider a general trait yi of an individual i in country j, and let Yk be measure of the mean value of the trait in the country of origin. Ideally, the mean Yk should be measured at the beginning of the immigration wave to country j which resulted in the second generation immigrant population in the sample. In this case Yk is interpreted to instrument from culture. The regression

yi=β0+β1Xi+∑kγkYk+ɛij

identifies the effects of country k's culture with γk, the coefficient of Yk.54

Data regarding several behavioral traits of interest are have been collected and analyzed using the epidemiological approach; see Fernandez and Fogli (2006a,b) for female labor supply and fertility, Giuliano (2007) for living arrangements of 18–30-year-olds, Tabellini (2005) and Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2008) for social capital, Algan and Cahuc (2007, 2009) and Tabellini (2008) for trust.

Statistics like the average speed of integration and the correlation between the speed of integration and the prevalence of the ethnic group in the country as a whole or in specific geographical areas, e.g., states could be produced with the data employed in the epidemiological literature. They would give a better picture of cultural transmission of ethnic and religious traits.

While the immigration literature provides much needed empirical evidence on integration, results cannot be interpreted to indicate the (causal) determinants of the speed of integration. In particular, properly identifying the determinants of integration would require identifying cross-cultural variations in attitudes towards integration on the part of immigrants from the incentives to integration, which depend on the socio-economic conditions of the destination country.55 Furthermore, this literature cannot address the important issue of changes in the speed of integration across generations, as little is known about third generations. Finally, the speed of integration depends on the cultural trait of interest, as for instance language assimilation is much faster than religious assimilation (Jasso, 2009).

7 Conclusion

According to wealth flows theory, cultural transmission of new family values is the principal driving force in fertility transition. However, without a theory which can link ecological conditions to cultural features and their distribution, the concept of culture risks being vague, both cause and effect, the unexplained explanator. Culture is many things: a body of accumulated information, a set of customs and rituals, group beliefs, and a mindset about the organization of the social and physical environments. Each of these components may be related to fertility; but a generalized culture concept cannot be successfully used to explain patterning and variation in fertility without risking causal circularity (Bock 1999).

The wealth flows theory of fertility transition is a major contribution to demography. The theory is general in that it explains both high and low fertility regimes. A second strength is that it addresses both exogenous variables and the psychological and social processes that translated those exogenous variables into individual behavior, emphasizing both economic and social factors in understanding fertility transitions. The theory helped to lay the groundwork for theories of the family to become a major perspective within the field of demography, and broadened the scope of demography by directing attention to culture. It also inspired and influenced a large number of empirical studies. However, in the strict sense of predicting two fertility regimes to be associated with upward and downward wealth flows, empirical evidence does not support the theory. In the weak sense of predicting a negative relationship between net wealth flows to children and fertility, there is a good deal of empirical support.

2.1 Civic capital as norms of cooperation: the Tabellini model

Tabellini (2008b) builds a very interesting model of the cultural transmission of cooperative values. He relies on and extends the value transmission framework first developed by Bisin and Verdier (2000, 2001) and Bisin et al. (2004), in which parents optimally choose what values to pass onto their children but, in so doing, assess their children's welfare in terms of their own values. In Tabellini's model, this creates a strategic complementarity between norms and behavior. If more people cooperate, then the payoff from cooperation increases and this expands the scope of cooperation. In turn, an expansion in the scope of cooperation makes it easier for parents to transmit good values to their children.

In Tabellini's model, the effect of any institutional change (such as the quality of law enforcement) is amplified and protracted over time because of cultural transmission. Most importantly, when individuals are allowed to choose their institutions through voting, the equilibrium shows path dependence: if initial conditions are favorable, then individuals will transmit values of generalized cooperation and choose strong legal enforcement; if initial conditions are unfavorable, then individuals will opt for values of limited cooperation and limited enforcement.

Cultural Transmission/Dual-Inheritance Theory

This first of two families of current approaches – related to selectionism by its interest in cultural transmission and therefore in history – is based on an analogy between cultural transmission and genetic transmission. Using formalisms modified from population genetics, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman gave mathematical interpretations to processes in cultural evolution that are analogous to the forces of mutation, selection, migration, and drift in evolutionary biology. This entailed a change in focus from the cultural evolutionist's interest in long-term trajectories of cultural systems to consideration of the fates of single traits, where a trait is “the result of any cultural action (by transmission from other individuals) that can be clearly observed or measured on a discontinuous or continuous scale.”

To apply these forces to culture change, some have to be redefined. Selection, for example, can occur on two levels: cultural selection, entailing adoption of a trait by individuals, and natural selection, which refers to the consequences of that decision on Darwinian fitness. Likewise, cultural transmission is much more varied than genetic transmission since it can be vertical (parents to offspring, as in genetic transmission), oblique (parental generation to offspring generation), or horizontal (within generation). Another important difference between cultural and biological transmission modulates the rate of culture change: cultural transmission may be ‘one to many’ (which can result in rapid change), ‘many to one’ (ordinarily quite conservative), or anywhere in between. These differences make it possible for cultural transmission and selection to result in fixation of behaviors that are detrimental to Darwinian fitness – for example, smoking cigarettes in many portions of the world, or female genital mutilation in North Africa.

Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, their students and colleagues have broadened and modified this strategy of analysis. They recognized that selection among alternative behaviors is often biased by factors such as the frequency of that behavior in the population, or the prestige of individuals using alternative behaviors; such biases can have significant effects on the course of culture change. A number of archaeologists (e.g., Bettinger and Shennan) have adopted portions of this approach, for example, to model how population size affects rate of culture change, or to infer processes of cultural transmission from the pattern of changing numbers of variant ceramic or projectile point designs through time.

Cultural transmissionists, selectionists, and historical linguists are also beginning to adapt phylogenetic tree- and network-building methods from evolutionary biology and from the study of the history of manuscripts (see Figure 2). These methods provide rigorous tools for investigating the history and pattern of branching and blending within various cultural domains, and also make it possible to control for common origin in assessing cross-cultural hypotheses of functional relationships (thus, overcoming ‘Galton's problem’). Phylogenetic approaches also make it possible to ask questions about the stability of co-occurrence and co-evolution of traits over long time spans. Do cultures have a stable ‘core’ of relatively unchanging characteristics or are all characters equally subject to change? By their macro-scale and their ability to consider many characters simultaneously, these approaches begin to return us to some of the same interests that motivated the earlier cultural evolutionists.

Studying education cross-culturally means ‘taking culture seriously.’ Education is thus understood as cultural transmission resulting from enculturation and socialization in informal or formal learning contexts. This article reviews the transmission of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values in these contexts and the effects of different types of education. It also includes a section on international comparisons of school achievement. The authors review some methodological problems linked to the comparative approach, and call for developing a solid theoretical base, using Berry's eco-cultural framework and the ‘developmental niche’ proposed by Super and Harkness.

GCC Via Gene–Culture Transmission

The intermediate mode of GCC stretches from the extreme of pure genetic transmission on one side to pure cultural transmission on the other. Gene action during neural and mental development plays a colorful role here. Unlike pure genetic transmission, gene action does not commit the developing mind and brain the one innately programmed specification of which cultural information will be accepted. And in stark contrast to pure cultural transmission, gene action does not flatten the individual's learning potential into a landscape of outcomes determined solely by culture. In gene–culture transmission, the activity of developmental genes establishes hills and valleys of learning preference. The hills mark outcomes partially blocked or less likely to occur; allied cultural information has little or no effect on learning and mental development and is less likely to be transmitted or utilized in an arbitrary manner. The valleys mark outcomes to which the mind's development is more likely to flow. Allied cultural information is strongly preferred and likely to be transmitted within and across generations of the evolving population, and used for specific goals in mental development. Thus, all cultures enjoy rich structures of myth and folklore within the creative uniqueness of each language community; grounding these language arts, however, are the deep universals of human linguistic cognition, a species universal that opens the door to mutual intelligibility and the swiftly meaningful translation of texts between cultures.

In gene–culture transmission, genes act to endow culture learning with directionality, not to program final behavior or mental state or leave the individual open to arbitrary cultural determination. The directionality essential to this form of learning can be operationalized only through choice, by selecting certain outcomes over others, and in humanlike species choice ultimately involves conscious reflective decision. Thus in marked contrast to pure genetic transmission and pure cultural transmission, Darwinian natural selection acting through gene–culture transmission is expected to select for individual minds which, in their creative actions of learning and deliberation, shape themselves. Their epigenetic rules endow them with basic competence for deliberative choice. Thinking to this extent for themselves, they are neither genetic robots nor culture slaves. We therefore begin to see why the hypotheses and proposals of human sociobiology have been found relevant beyond the natural and social sciences, especially in the debates of humanists, philosophers, lawmakers, and theologians.

These are principal conceptual alternatives in the mechanisms of cultural transmission during gene–culture coevolution. Although research is ongoing, provisional inferences may be made on the basis of the advances achieved by investigators in multiple fields across the biological, behavioral, and social sciences including sociobiology. Seen against the background of such advances, the paradigm of the tabula rasa or blank slate – ordaining pure cultural transmission – cuts a very poor figure. Consistently across the developmental events spotlighted by the primary epigenetic rules are signs of either pure genetic transmission, or of gene–culture transmission focused tightly on a narrow range of sensoriperceptual competences. In the development of higher order capacities for learning, choice, decision, and creativity the gene–culture transmission strategies prevail, in which a range of outcomes is notably favored over others. The mode I have here called pure cultural transmission of course remains essential to complete understanding (you may drive on the left while I adhere to the right). However, no evidence supports the hypothesis that pure cultural transmission and the tabula rasa strategy of learning alone is suffice to understand human evolution and its consequences for sociality, culture, and creativity.

D SYSTEMATIC FIELD OBSERVATION

The twentieth century has seen the emergence of systematic and quantitative field studies that have taken the study of cultural transmission and observational learning far beyond the naturalistic anecdotes of the preceding century (Nishida, 1987). Thus, for example, it has been possible to classify different subcultures of chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) that show variations in the use of certain tools and food types not explicable by the local availability of the raw materials (McGrew, et al., 1979; McGrew, 1992). Cross-fostering showed that oyster catcher (Haematopus ostralegus) chicks adopt the particular technique of the local cultural group to which their parents belong—those that stab or those that hammer to open the shells of the mussels they eat (Norton-Griffiths, 1969). Perhaps most famous of all, the diffusion of new feeding techniques in groups of Japanese macaques (Macaco fuscata) has been documented in some detail (Kawai, 1965; Itani and Nishimura, 1973). The literature has become enormously rich with such observational evidence; in a nonexhaustive survey of foraging behavior alone, Lefebvre and Palameta (1988; Table 7.1) list 73 studies claiming social transmission in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

The role of imitation or other mechanisms through which transmission occurs is much less well specified. However, with an increasingly refined understanding of the discriminations that must be made in the field between the alternative mimetic processes that may underlie the spontaneous behavior observed (see Section III), some fieldworkers have recently attempted the critical observations. Thus, in a group of vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) previously observed for many years, Hauser (1988) was able to document the emergence and spread of the use of acacia pods to extract exudate from a hole in an acacia tree. The whole process was quite rapid, with four individuals adopting the technique within 9 days and another two within 22 days. Given continuity of observation, details of the first incorporation of the act into each animal’s repertoire provided evidence that different individuals acquired the technique by different routes. One appeared to deduce what to do from observing the end product (the model finally eating dipped pods), whereas another watched the model prepare and consume pods “and then performed the whole behavior.”

The latter observation is still not a watertight demonstration of imitation because it must remain possible that some parts of the developing actions escaped observation and these might have been subject to other processes like trial-and-error learning; unless such a case study is seamlessly continuous, convincing field evidence for imitation may remain elusive. What such detailed case studies can achieve is to specify more clearly than before the scope for imitation and how it might interact with other mimetic processes—an important advance in field studies.

5.1.2 The demise of intellect

The second explanation for the end of systemopoia is the as yet unappreciated factor of sheer ignorance, the collapse of the system of cultural transmission of Judaism. That second factor is constituted by the utter loss of access to that permanent treasury of the human experience of Jewry preserved and handed on in the canonical Torah. The Judaisms that survive—political and ethnic in the main—do provide ready access to emotional or political encounters, readily available to all by definition. But they offer none of that confrontation of taste and judgment, intellect and reflection, that takes place in traditional cultures and with tradition. The twentieth-century systems resort mainly to the immediately accessible experiences of emotions and of politics. The repertoire of human experience in Rabbinic Judaism presents as human options the experience of the ages. By contrast Israeli nationalism and American Judaism—the two most influential systems that move Jews to action in the world today—scarcely concern themselves with that Judaism. They work with the raw materials made available by contemporary experience: emotions on the one side, politics on the other. Access to realms beyond requires learning in literature, the only resource for human experience beyond the immediate. But the Judaic systems of the twentieth century do not resort to the reading of books as a principal act of their way of life, in the way in which Rabbinic Judaism and its continuators did and do. The consequence is a strikingly abbreviated agenda of issues, a remarkably one-dimensional program of urgent questions.