The ontogeny of cultural learning

• Cumulative cultural evolution is unique to the human species.
• One basis for cumulative culture is human children's tendency to conform.
• Another basis for cumulative culture is human adults’ tendency to instruct.
• Adult instruction and child conformity create ‘objective’ cultural knowledge.

All primates engage in one or another form of social learning. Humans engage in cultural learning. From very early in ontogeny human infants and young children do not just learn useful things from others, they conform to others in order to affiliate with them and to identify with the cultural group. The cultural group normatively expects such conformity, and adults actively instruct children so as to ensure it. Young children learn from this instruction how the world is viewed and how it works in their culture. These special forms of cultural learning enable powerful and species-unique processes of cumulative cultural evolution.