Cultural learning can transmit behaviors that natural selection eliminates.
Evidence
While most people don’t copy suicide, this domain illustrates just how potent our cultural learning abilities can be and how they influence broad social patterns. If people will acquire suicidal behavior via cultural learning, it’s not clear what the boundaries are on the power of culture in our species. Copying suicide highlights the potency of our imitative tendencies and means that under the right conditions we can acquire practices via cultural learning that natural selection has directly acted to eliminate under most conditions. If humans will imitate something that is so starkly not in our self-interest, or that of our genes, imagine all the other less costly things we are willing to acquire by cultural transmission. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 185
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The point that imitation can override natural selection even against genetic self-interest is a sustained, paradigm-level claim, not a passing observation.
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s coercion-vulnerability framework: if culture can transmit lynchpin behaviors against self-interest, it can transmit compliance practices too. — connects to: Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 365; Cultural evolution can create selection pressures stronger than natural ones — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 282; Cultural evolution can spread maladaptive behaviors that destroy social cooperation — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 447 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Cultural evolution can spread maladaptive behaviors that destroy social cooperation
#exemplifies(0.88) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 447 - Cultural evolution can lock groups into maladaptive equilibria, not just prosocial ones
#corroborates(0.85) - Cultural evolution can create selection pressures stronger than natural ones
#expands(0.78) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 282 - Natural selection built cultural learning that can overwrite innate preferences
#qualifies(0.75) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 365