Learners adopt causally opaque cultural practices through implicit trust in accumulated wisdom

Evidence

Nevertheless, as a cultural species, we have an instinct to faithfully copy complex procedures, practices, beliefs, and motivations, including steps that may appear causally irrelevant, because cultural evolution has proved itself capable of constructing intricate and subtle cultural packages that are far better than we could individually construct in one lifetime. Often, people don’t even know what their practices are actually doing, or that they are “doing” anything. Spicy-food lovers in hot climates don’t know that using recipes involving garlic and chili peppers protect their families from meat-borne pathogens. They just culturally inherited the tastes and the recipes, and implicitly had faith in the wisdom accumulated by earlier generations. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Puts the conformist-bias transmission concern in context: copying runs on opaque package-trust independent of causal understanding. — connects to: Causally opaque technologies make individual learning lethal and select for faith in tradition. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 323; Learners suppress causal reasoning when cultural transmission supplies ready-made models — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 375; Children activate causal reasoning mainly when observing people use cultural artifacts — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 378 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Selective social learning yields group-level cultural accumulation beyond any individual’s knowledge #corroborates (0.90) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 198
• Conformist transmission lets learners aggregate dispersed wisdom rapidly #expands (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 179
• Conformist transmission biases learners toward adopting a population’s most frequent cultural traits. #expands (0.85) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 23
• Cultural learning biases explain passionate commitment to some gods but not others #exemplifies (0.74) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 354
• Prestige status emerges from second-order cultural learning cues, not verified skill #expands (0.73) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 393
• Cultural selection shaped psychology to read supernatural-belief cues for trustworthiness #qualifies (0.72) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 211