The Psychological Foundations of Culture

Mark Schaller, Christian S. Crandall

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135648145
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How is it that cultures come into existence at all? How do cultures develop particular customs and characteristics rather than others? How do cultures persist and change over time? Most previous attempts to address these questions have been descriptive and historical. The purpose of this book is to provide answers that are explanatory, predictive, and relevant to the emergence and continuing evolution of cultures past, present, and future. Most other investigations into "cultural psychology" have focused on the impact that culture has on the psychology of the individual. The focus of this book is the reverse.


The authors show how questions about the origins and evolution of culture can be fruitfully answered through rigorous and creative examination of fundamental characteristics of human cognition, motivation, and social interaction. They review recent theory and research that, in many different ways, points to the influence of basic psychological processes on the collective structures that define cultures. These processes operate in all sorts of different populations, ranging from very small interacting groups to grand-scale masses of people occupying the same demographic or geographic category. The cultural effects--often unintended--of individuals' thoughts and actions are demonstrated in a wide variety of customs, ritualized practices, and shared mythologies: for example, religious beliefs, moral standards, rules for the allocation of resources, norms for the acceptable expression of aggression, gender stereotypes, and scientific values.

The Psychological Foundations of Culture reveals that the consequences of psychological processes resonate well beyond the disciplinary constraints of psychology. By taking a psychological approach to questions usually addressed by anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists, it suggests that psychological research into the foundations of culture is a useful--perhaps even necessary--complement to other forms of inquiry.

PART
I
HOW CULTURES EMERGE AT ALL

CHAPTER
2
Human Awareness of Mortality and the Evolution of Culture

Sheldon Solomon
Skidmore College

Jeff Greenberg
University of Arizona

Jeff Schimel
University of Alberta

Jamie Arndt
University of Missouri–Columbia

Tom Pyszczynski
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Culture and history and religion and science . . . [are] different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is a fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction. (Jaynes, 1976, p.)

We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture . . . The question is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. (Wilson, 1998, p.)

What are the psychological foundations of culture? Authors tend to combine two perspectives when addressing this question. The first is an evolutionary perspective, which depicts Homo sapiens as animals who have evolved from earlier hominid species; cultures, as products of human thought and action, must therefore have resulted from adaptations over the course of evolution. The second is a cognitive science perspective, which depicts humans as information processing systems, a view that derives from the influential metaphor of the human mind as a computer.

Although our information-processing abilities cannot be denied, if we are animals, we cannot be computers; rather, the drives, desires, and processes by which we think, act, and create and perpetuate cultures must be those of an animal. In addition, despite the fact that social and natural scientists routinely tell people that humans are information-processing animals designed only to survive long enough to reproduce and care for their offspring before they die, people rarely if ever view themselves that way. People want to view themselves not as mere gene-conveying animals, but as beings who lead significant and enduring lives, and one critical function of culture is to help people accomplish that. To understand the psychological foundations of culture, then, we need a third complementary perspective that acknowledges that humans are animals with uniquely impressive intellectual capabilities, but with needs for meaning and value as well.

We think that the existential psychodynamic perspective provided by terror management theory does just that. In this chapter, we explain how this perspective provides novel insights that are necessary for any compelling account of the psychological foundations and functions of culture. The theory acknowledges the core animal drives and desires of humans as well as the intellectual advances which make us unique, especially the capacities for self-consciousness and temporal thought. It explains how the human needs for meaning and value emerge from this biological heritage and the role of culture in serving these needs. The theory is consistent with evolutionary principles, fits what we know about cultures past and present, and has generated a large body of empirical support within experimental social psychology.

CONTEMPORARY EVOLUTIONARY THEORIZING ABOUT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTURE

Prominent thinkers from a number of disciplines have noted that a theoretical account of culture—humanly created and transmitted beliefs about the nature of reality manifested through uniquely human institutions such as religion, art, and science—is a central problem in the study of mind (see e.g., Mithen, 1996; Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Wilson, 1998). In their seminal 1992 paper “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” John Tooby and Leda Cosmides proposed two critical epistemological prerequisites for addressing this problem. First, an adequate theory of culture must be grounded in evolutionary biology. Given the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in accounting for the “fit” between physical characteristics of living organisms and their environments and how the physical attributes (within and between species) of populations change over time, all human behavioral and psychological propensities are presumably similarly best understood as consequences of evolutionary processes. Second, it must be framed in terms of psychological processes. Because all cultural affectations initially originated in minds of individuals, “culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p.). Consequently, all theoretical perspectives that presume the existence of culture without explaining its psychological underpinnings are epistemologically untenable (e.g., Durkheim, 1895/1962; Geertz, 1973; Miller, 1999; Shweder, 1990).

Despite this recognition of the importance of understanding the psychological underpinnings of culture, as well as the epistemological prerequisites for doing so, we believe that progress toward this goal has stalled for two reasons. First, discourse in evolutionary psychology regarding culture is currently dominated by an emphasis on cognitive information-gathering processes and adaptation to the physical environment in the service of enhancing reproductive fitness. For example, Tooby and Cosmides (1992) and Mithen (1996) view culture as a means to store and transmit useful information that facilitates effective exploitation of the physical environment. Similarly, Harris (1979) argues that cultural constructions developed as post hoc accommodations to material reality (e.g., prohibitions against eating pork developed in areas where raising hogs would be detrimental to survival relative to alternative means of sustenance). We have no quarrel with these assertions; clearly, culture facilitates the transmission of useful information and is a reflection of material conditions. However, following de Waal (2000, p.), we insist that a proper understanding of the nature and function of culture additionally requires an explicit consideration of nonmaterial, nonrational, non-information-processing psychological factors:

Why can’t evolutionary psychology put a little less evolution and a little more psychology into its thinking? We evolved a complex mental life that makes us act in all sorts of ways the sum of which should enhance reproductive success. But this strategy is by no means required for each and every behavior. To focus on just one, isolated from the rest of the package, is like seeking to understand why the kangaroo has such tiny front legs while ignoring what happened to its hind legs and tail.

Second, contemporary discourse in evolutionary psychology concerning the psychological functions of culture is generally uninformed by relevant ideas from psychoanalysis and experimental social psychology; the prototypic but by no means only example being Tooby and Cosmides’s (1992) blanket condemnation of the social sciences lumped together under the caricature rubric of the Standard Social Science Model. E. O. Wilson (1998, p.) similarly disposes of more than a century of psychoanalytic thought in a few sentences—“Freud’s conception of the unconscious, by focusing attention on hidden irrational processes of the brain, was a fundamental contribution to culture. It became a wellspring of ideas flowing from psychology into the humanities. But it is mostly wrong.” Well, it is certainly partly wrong, but it is also partly right, and many of Freud’s erroneous ideas have been refined and/or corrected by subsequent psychodynamic theorists (e.g., Becker, 1971; Brown, 1959; Horney, 1950; Rank, 1936). In addition, there is a burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature in support of many aspects of psychodynamic theories, including the existence of non-rational, nonconscious mental processes (see e.g., Erdelyi, 1985; Greenwald, 1980; Kunda, 1990; Pennebaker, 1990; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999; Westen, 1998). Indeed, we now explain how a contemporary psychodynamic perspective and the research guided by it can facilitate a fuller understanding of the psychological underpinnings of culture.

AN EXISTENTIAL PSYCHODYNAMIC ACCOUNT OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE

If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms—peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events—may be accepted and pointed to as symbols. (Spengler, 1926, pp.)

The quest to understand the psychological foundations of culture is not of recent origin; nor are evolutionary approaches to this question. Following Nietzsche (e.g., The Gay Science, 1887/1974; Twilight of the Idols, 1888/1998), Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926/1999) explicitly posed the question of what culture is and what functions it serves. His contemporary Freud was also interested in questions surrounding the nature of culture. Freud knew and respected Darwin’s The Origin of Species (see, e.g., Newton, 1995), and genuinely believed that psychoanalytic theory was constructed from an explicitly evolutionary perspective. Indeed, Otto Fenichel (1945, p.) described the epistemological underpinnings of psychoanalytic inquiry this way:

Scientific psychology explains mental phenomena as a result of the interplay of primitive physical needs—rooted in the biological structure of man and developed in the course of biological history (and therefore changeable in the course of further biological history)—and the influences of the environment on these needs.

Freud recognized the psychological foundations of culture as a central problem, and this was the primary focus of his later work, especially The Future of an Illusion (1928/1989) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1989)— work that in turn influenced Hungarian psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim’s The Evolution of Culture (1934) and The Origin and Function of Culture (1943).

Roheim (1943, p.) carefully considered the possibility that culture consists of accumulating accurate information about the nature of reality:

. . . human beings living in a group, find a way to combine their energies in the struggle with the environment and . . . the most effective means are finally employed in this struggle. Variations in culture would in this case arise as variations in these means conditioned by a varying environment.

But he rejected this notion as “far from being true.” Consistent with his psychoanalytic orientation, Roheim felt that culture was ultimately a product of the complex interplay of people’s psychological needs, and that the need for accuracy was not the only need, or even the most important one, served by cultural conceptions of reality.

For Roheim, even a cursory examination of different cultures’ fundamentally inconsistent and mutually exclusive cosmologies—accounts of the origin and structure of the universe and the role of human beings in it—renders the notion that culture serves a rational information-processing function providing accurate accounts of physical reality, at least highly suspect, if not patently absurd. As examples (reported in Langer, 1982), the Ainu, aboriginal people in northern Japan, believe in superhuman women with teeth in their vaginas who bear only female offspring after being impregnated by the wind; the Lugbara in northwestern Uganda and eastern Zaire describe God as a tall white man-like creature cut in half with one eye, ear, arm, and leg; in New Guinea, the Watut believe tadpoles gestated in the body of a boy killed by a ghost swim ashore and metamorphosize into girls and boys who take possession of the earth after spending their childhood years playing on the beach; in some parts of Borneo it is believed that humans descended from a sword handle that mated with a spindle. A bit closer to home, a substantial proportion of the population of the Western world believes that a large old bearded God created humankind in his image along with the rest of the inhabitants of the earth in six days before taking a well-deserved day of rest (Genesis), whereas highly successful and educated followers of the modern Western religion Scientology believe that “people are immortal spirits who have lived through many lifetimes after being banished to Earth 75 million years ago by an intergalactic ruler” (Frantz, 1998, p. A24).

Instead, citing examples from Melanesian folk-lore such as:

A small bird invites all the animals to a great feast. Then he pulls mountain goats’ fat out of his rectum with a hook and feeds them all. Raven boasts, “I can do the same.” But when he tries only blood comes out of his intestines and he is put to shame before the guests.

Roheim (1943, p.) observed that all cultures are, in his words, “actuated” by phantastic beliefs about magical power employed to confer a sense of individual invincibility, from which he concluded that:

The process of becoming civilized is . . . not the direct result of adaptation to environment. . . . It is through a series of complicated mechanisms of dealing with anxiety that our civilization has developed and is still developing. . . . But these modifications are not due to the pressure of reality. . . . The same environment . . . did not compel the chimpanzee to modify its ego-structure. (Roheim, 1934, pp. 403, 416, 417)

What, then, is the nature of the uniquely human anxiety and the complicated mechanisms designed to reduce it that characterizes the development of culture?

Consciousness: The Great Shift!

Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; . . . from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought. (Nietzsche, 1887/1974, p.)

Consciousness is the psychological attribute that renders us distinctly human, and makes culture both possible and necessary. Nietszche (1887/ 1974), Jaynes (1976), and Humphrey (1984) each independently hypothe- sized that consciousness evolved in humans in order to facilitate effective social interactions in groups arranged in dominance hierarchies—presumably because a person who knew how she or he felt would be in a better position to predict the behavior of others, which in turn conferred adaptive advantages to those in possession of such awareness. Consciousness is thus a fundamentally social (con-scious = to know with) and learned linguistic (and hence uniquely human) construction by which individuals conceive of themselves (I) as the principle characters in an ongoing narrative (Bruner, 1986, 1990) arranged in a three-dimensional spatialized mind-space (e.g., “I am looking forward to seeing you again soon” “I’ll keep an eye out for you”).

Consciousnes...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: HOW CULTURES EMERGE AT ALL
• PART II: HOW SPECIFIC CULTURAL NORMS ARISE
• PART III: HOW CULTURES PERSIST AND CHANGE OVER TIME
• EPILOGUE