Baum's Definition of Culture

Baum's Definition of Culture

• Culture involves customs shared by a group, emphasizing concrete practices.
• Culture is learned through group membership.
• Learned behaviors are shared among group members.
• Culture includes both verbal and nonverbal operant behavior.
• Behaviors are acquired through group-arranged consequences.
• Cultural practices are transmitted between group members.
• Culture is a population-level phenomenon.

Anthropologists vs. Behaviorists on Culture

• Before the 1970s, anthropologists defined culture using abstract concepts like shared attitudes and beliefs.
• Marvin Harris defined culture through shared customs/behaviors.
• Behaviorists define culture concretely by shared practices (verbal and nonverbal).
• Behaviorist approach focuses on observable behavior over internal mental states.
• Psychologists and evolutionary biologists influenced the redefinition of culture in behavioral terms.

Altruism and Society

• Society is defined as a stable group living together, acting altruistically.
• Altruism is a key characteristic of a society.
• A society is marked by stable group association with altruistic behavior.
• Altruism in closely related individuals may be selected through shared altruistic genes, reducing need for reciprocity.
• In unrelated individuals, mutual benefit depends on reciprocity.
• Remembering group members and tracking debts are selected alongside altruistic genes to ensure reciprocity.
• Societal members may sacrifice resources for the group, while cheating must be curbed to maintain cohesion.

Culture: Costs, Benefits, and Self-Interest

• Traits crucial for culture involve small individual costs for large group benefits.
• Social reinforcement allows members to shape each other's behavior, increasing group survival.
• Replicators (genes or practices) act out of self-interest.
• Some genetically coded traits and cultural practices promote group survival at the individual's expense.
• Genes may be selected to subordinate individual welfare to the group, explaining altruism/cooperation.

Group Selection and Self-Sacrifice

• Group selection explains self-sacrificing behavior.
• Traits benefiting the group but costing the individual can be selected when groups compete/succeed (or fail) as units.
• Individuals sacrifice resources, risk injury, or forgo reproduction for group membership benefits.

Benefits of Group Living

• Animals feeding together spend more time feeding and less time watching for predators.
• Genes can induce alarm calls when a predator is present, benefiting the group.
• Food sharing among kin is common, extending to non-kin based on group benefit compared to groups with less sharing.
• Genes promoting behavior patterns are selected by group selection when benefits to the individual as a group member outweigh costs.

Maintenance of Cultural Practices via Genetics

• Genes may be selected to subordinate individual welfare for the group.
• These genes need only do better on average and in the long run compared to genes prioritizing individual short-term benefit first.
• Cultural practices promote cohesion, cooperative breeding, hunting, food sharing, and defense.
• These practices contribute to group success, even if costly to individuals.
• Warfare can drive the evolution of cooperative activities and benefit the group in cohesion, defense, and resource acquisition.
• Tribes engage in warfare involving raids, murder, skirmishes, and battles, taking vital resources (territory, animals, people).

Genetic vs Cultural Evolution

• Genetic evolution requires different alleles at gene locations.
• Cultural evolution needs various cultural "alleles" to compete and make trait packages possible.
• Cultural replicators or practices vary in execution/expression within a group, defined by their function and activities.
• Novelty arises through mutation, recombination, and immigration.
• Accidents/errors in behavior lead to novel variants.
• Immigration introduces new practices.
• Cultural transmission involves transferring behavior from one group member to another, unlike genetic transmission from parent to offspring.
• Acquired characteristics can be inherited in cultural evolution through learning.
• Transmission occurs through imitation and rule-governed behavior.
• Cultural transmission is faster than biological evolution because it occurs during an individual's life.
• Selection in cultural evolution occurs through differential survival and reproduction of practices.
• Cultural replicators can be longer-lived, more fecund, or more faithfully copied.
• Practices directly affecting survival/reproduction are naturally selected.
• Selective transmission favors imitating success.
• Cultural group selection occurs when groups compete, favoring practices that promote group cohesion/cooperation.
• Replicators are selfish, selecting for traits subordinating individual's welfare to the group.

Cultural Replicators

• Cultural replicators are units of selection in cultural evolution, analogous to genes.
• A cultural replicator is an activity engaged in and transmitted by the group, serving a function, resulting in a certain effect, or accomplishing a certain result.
• Cultural replicators are activities or practices (verbal and nonverbal) rather than beliefs, ideas, or values.
• They are identified by their function or the result achieved.
• They vary in size from artifacts/actions to clusters of interdependent customs.
• Like genes, some variants among cultural replicators are longer-lived, more fecund, or faithfully copied.

Examples of Cultural Replicators

• Specific verbal practices, such as greetings or bargaining.
• Traditional utterances, such as sayings, stories, myths, moral injunctions, instructions, and knowledge.

Guided Variation

• Guided variation is behavior individually acquired then transmitted by imitation/teaching.
• Definition is broader than Skinner’s notion of design of culture because it includes instances involving no verbal behavior.
• Adaptation through rational calculation proceeds via collection of information, estimation of results, evaluation of desirability.
• Guiding criteria translate environmental variation into directional change in phenotype, culturally transmitted and naturally selected.

Skinner's Experimental Society

• Skinner proposed an experimental society that constantly tries new cultural practices to address challenges.
• Society should experiment with new practices as a cultural norm.
• Cultural practices change too slowly and practices that have worked in the past may become maladaptive and need to be replaced.
• Design of culture involves more experimentation, planning, and evaluation.
• Survival implies change in response to long-term relations.
• Solely responding to short-term relations usually spells disaster- Short-term and long-term relations usually can conflict.
• Experts should make guesses about long-term consequences to recommend new practices.
• Skinner equated guided variation with design of culture.

Improving Fitness

• Regulation reinforces behavior with desirable long-term consequences.
• Change depends on groups responding to expert predictions.
• Verbal behavior generates discriminative stimuli promoting new practices.
• Practices change to prevent significant decrease in and to increase fitness.

Objections of Experimental Society

• Control of actions is based on simplified conditions, far removed from the complexities of everyday life. Yet, science must start with simplification to learn how to deal with complexities.
• Design may lead to regimentation/uniformity, removing diversity. Yet, designs could support diversity.

Defining Happiness

• Freedom from aversive control: greater happiness when free from threats of aversive consequences or removal of accustomed reinforcement.
• Choice: environments providing choices with reinforcing consequences.
• Freedom from exploitation and equitable reinforcers: long-term happiness when free from exploitive relationships, receiving equitable reinforcers.
• Fitness: happiness coincides with fitness, deriving from personal survival/comfort, welfare of family, and beneficial relationships.
• Short-term happiness relates to immediate personal reinforcement.
• Long-term happiness relates to reproductive success/survival of culture.
• Long-term happiness often has a conflict with short-term personal reinforcement.