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Cultural and Collective Brain Hypotheses#

See also: diversity, distribution

Henrich et al (2023)

Below, we highlight and summarize four insights that arise from the Cultural and Collective Brain Hypotheses:

  1. Innovation and cumulative cultural evolution depend heavily on the size, interconnectedness, and diversity of a population's or network's collective brain.

  2. Individual smartness, or the ability of individuals to solve locally relevant problems, depends on the products of cumulative cultural evolution and thus on the collective brain.

  3. With the rise of distributed cognition and an informational division of labor as well as the challenge of increasingly diverse problems, cultural evolutionary incentives favor effective problem-solving in small groups and at scale. The problem-solving abilities of groups depend heavily on their cognitive diversity and social psychology as well as a wide range of interactional, organizational, and epistemological norms.

  4. Collective decision-making—the ability of groups to make smart decisions—depends on culturally evolved norms that govern the interactions among individuals and subgroups as well as the selection of leaders.

References#

Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (n.d.). What Makes Us Smart? Topics in Cognitive Science, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12656