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.