Cultural evolution: integrating psychology, evolution and culture

• Humans have colonised and transformed every terrestrial environment on the planet.
• This ecological success can be attributed to our capacity for cultural evolution.
• High fidelity social learning allows the preservation/accumulation of cultural traits.
• Learning biases govern who people learn from and what they learn.
• These biases scale up to explain larger patterns of cultural diversity and stability.

Cultural evolution represents a body of theory and findings premised on the notions that, (i), human cultural change constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary process that shares key characteristics with (but is not identical in details to) genetic evolution; (ii), this second evolutionary process has been instrumental in our species’ dramatic ecological success by allowing the rapid, open-ended generation and accumulation of technology, social institutions, knowledge systems and behavioural practices far beyond the complexity of other species’ socially learned behaviour; and (iii), our psychology permits, and has been shaped by, this cultural evolutionary process, for example, through socio-cognitive mechanisms such as imitation, teaching and intentionality that support high-fidelity social learning, and biases governing from whom and what we learn.