Culture–gene coevolutionary psychology: cultural learning, language, and ethnic psychology

• Culture–gene coevolution shows how cultural transmission interacts with genetic evolution.
• We illustrate this with research on cultural learning, language, and group cognition.
• CGC approaches help us understanding how, and from whom, people socially learn.
• They explain how language capacities evolved and how their diversity shapes cognition.
• CGC suggests why humans stereotype linguistic and tagged social groups.

While most psychologists recognize the importance of genes and culture in shaping human cognition, few theoretical perspectives in the field offer a framework for understanding their relationship and for deriving predictions about the structure of the variation we see across space and time. Here we argue that culture–gene coevolutionary (CGC) frameworks have such potential, and can unite disparate fields across the social sciences and sub-fields within psychology. We illustrate the power of this functionalist evolutionary approach by reviewing recent research on three interlinked topics; cultural learning rules, language cognition, and reasoning about ethnic social groups. We show how CGC approaches complement, and contrast with, traditional approaches in psychology on these topics. Furthermore, this theoretical framework has already been fruitful in drawing new predictions and pointing to new directions of inquiry.