Review of General Psychology
2012, Vol. 16, No. 2, 121–133
© 2012 American Psychological Association
1089-2680/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0027907
Are the New Mass Media Subverting Cultural Transmission?
Jerome H. Barkow
Rick O’Gorman
Dalhousie University and Queen’s University Belfast
University of Essex
Luke Rendell
University of St Andrews
Popular culture is a subcategory of culture. Today, mass and new media appear to be interfering with the
evolved mechanisms that permit the acquisition and editing of culture. We know surprisingly little about these
cognitive attentional processes that enable the information acquisition and editing packed into the term
“cultural transmission.” It was Michael Chance who first concluded that we attend to and learn preferentially
from those high in status. For Chance, high status based on fear leads to agonistic attention and a constricted
type of learning, while hedonic attention based on respect permits much broader learning possibilities. If
Chance’s theories are supported, then it would follow that much of the current unpredictability of popular
culture and culture change in general reflects the replacement of family and community high-status figures by
influential media celebrities, thereby damaging the transmission of local culture. Chance’s approach would
also explain why we seem to find it difficult to pay attention to those low in status and power. There may be
attractors of attention involved in cultural transmission in addition to status, including physical attractiveness.
We consider, from an evolutionary perspective, various researchable hypotheses that stem from Chance’s and
related work and from ethnography, we discuss this work’s implications for how we understand culture and
“popular culture,” and we argue that the kind of research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology we espouse
is also needed for the next generation of mathematical models of gene– culture coevolution. We conclude with
a list of research questions.
Keywords: attention, mass media, cultural transmission, prestige, role model
2008). There is little doubt that they have transformed at least
some aspects of cultural transmission.
Rapid and unpredictable sociocultural change was not always
the norm. Once, parents could take for granted that their children would want to be like them, or at least like some member
of their community. They could be reasonably confident that the
cultural milieu young people would experience would be similar to what they themselves and their own parents and grandparents had experienced. Today, there is no such assurance.
Young people in Central Asia or West Africa may be paying
more attention to Lady Gaga, Eminem, the late Amy Winehouse, or Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda than to the adults
immediately around them. Transformative cultural ideas can
spread within and between societies at astonishing speed,
thanks to 20th- and 21st-century advances in communications
technology. Popular culture is at once global and personalized,
distributed among Internet-linked social networks. Older mass
media such as TV and motion pictures have joined with the
newer interactive social media, some would argue, to break the
chain of cultural transmission and replace it with cultural confusion. But if the chain has been broken, what was it like when
it was whole? If it is true that the media are disrupting informational inputs to the cognitive mechanisms that evolved to
permit cultural transmission and editing, what are the social,
cultural, and political effects of this rupture? The implication of
these questions is clear: We need to deepen our knowledge of
the evolved mechanisms that enable cultural transmission and
of the gene– culture coevolution that produced them.
There is a growing view that the mass media and new media are
disrupting the fabric of modern life. Some commentators suggest
that they are altering the psychology of our brains, somehow
rewiring us in ways that are harmful and different from the past
(Carr, 2010; Hansard, 2009; Sigman, 2009; Small & Vorgan,
Jerome H. Barkow, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, and Institute of Cognition and
Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast Northern Ireland, United
Kingdom; Rick O’Gorman, Department of Psychology, University of
Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom; Luke Rendell, School of Biology,
University of St Andrews, Scotland.
This work was sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research,
Air Force Material Command, USAF, under grant numbers FA8655-101-3012 and FA8655-09-1-5067. The U.S. government is authorized to
reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purpose notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. We thank the U.S. Air Force Office of
Scientific Research and the European Office of Aerospace Research and
Development for their support of the 2008 Queen’s University Belfast
workshop on “Social Disorganization and Human Evolution,” and for the
2009 follow-up workshop held at the University of St Andrews. “Social
Disorganization and Human Evolution: Progress and Plans.” The authors
are grateful to Maryanne Fisher and to an anonymous reviewer for their
very helpful comments on a draft. J. H. Barkow thanks Peter M. Hejl for
his contribution to the development of the core ideas that ultimately led to
this article. Barkow, during the preparation of this article, was Visiting
Professor, Department of OTANES, University of South Africa.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jerome
H. Barkow, 2112 Beech Street, Halifax NS, B3L2X8 Canada. E-mail:
[email protected]
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Here is the plan of attack: First, we will argue that there is little
evidence of a “new” psychology but much evidence for the continuity of the old. Then, in order to prepare for the discussion of
cultural transmission, we explain what we mean by the terms
“culture” and “popular culture.” We go on to deconstruct the trope
of “transmission” and, finally, conclude that this metaphor carries
so much baggage that, especially at the level of the individual, it is
often preferable (and more accurate) to speak not of cultural
transmission but of cultural acquisition and editing. But nothing
gets acquired/edited if no one is paying attention, and attention is
a key concept in any discussion of social learning.
A major attractor1 of attention is high social rank: As Michael
Chance (discussed later in the article) taught us, we tend to pay
preferential attention to those high in status. High position in a
social hierarchy, however, turns out to be just one possible attention attractor that may result in culture acquisition/editing. A range
of primate attention attractors (such as those involved in nurturing
offspring, courtship and sex, avoiding danger, etc.), regardless of
their original functions, could have served as the evolutionary
bases for the attention attractors that, in modern humans, are
involved in cultural transmission/editing. An attention attractor
opens a cognitive gate, we will argue, and the selecting and
filtering of the information thereby obtained may usefully be
understood in terms of the attractor’s precultural function.
This theoretical structure turns out to give rise to numerous
hypotheses about how humans acquire, edit, and transmit culture;
these hypotheses can be tested in terms of how we interact today
with mass and new media. We need to learn which attention
attractors are involved in cultural transmission/editing of what
kinds of information, how the attractor involved may filter and bias
what it receives, and which mechanisms are susceptible to informational input from mass and new media and which are not. These
complexities represent opportunities for laboratory psychologists
and model-building gene– culture coevolutionists alike. One such
opportunity involves new theory and research pertinent to the idea
of “role model,” and another to an explanation of why, for many
of us, the poor, weak, and oppressed are often invisible.
There Is No Imminent Singularity
Is 30 the new 60? Are the older mass and the newer social media
combining with advancing technology and programs that write
programs to bring us to the “singularity”? A recurring popular
culture theme associated with science fiction, cybernetics, and
transhumanism is the idea that we are on the verge of a saltatory
step comparable to the collapse of a black hole. At the center of a
black hole, according to the theory of general relativity, is a
gravitational singularity. In the predicted human singularity, unknowable posthuman intelligences will finally supersede the
evolved psychologies that were forged in the environments we
experienced over the millennia of our evolutionary history (e.g.,
Bowlby’s, 1969, environment of evolutionary adaptation). If so,
our hard-won knowledge of human behavior is likely to become
irrelevant and obsolete. With due respect to such visionaries as
Vernon Vinge (1993) and Raymond Kurzweil (2005), however,
there is no sign of any such psychological discontinuity. Rather,
we use new technology for old purposes: Even exponentially
advanced artificial intelligences, so long as they are designed to
achieve human ends, are unlikely to be any different. For example,
what do we use biomedical technology for? Largely for the prolongation of life and well-being, of course, but we use significant
amounts in the development of the techniques of cosmetic surgery
and chemicals such as sildenafil citrate (Viagra) and tadalafi
(Cialis). These products are clearly in the service of old goals such
as sex and the maintenance of courtship competitiveness. What is
one of the main uses of the Internet? Why, sexual fantasy, courtship, and social contact with others. The familiar topics of everyday gossip (Barkow, 1992) reappear in talk shows (Schwender,
2001), while the thematic content of newspaper headlines, even
transnationally, has changed little for centuries (Davis & McLeod,
2003). Today, some of us may substitute flame wars for bar-room
brawls; we may do our competing, social bonding, and even
courtship in online, massively multiplayer role-playing games such
as World of Warcraft; we may even “live” in immense, participatory virtual worlds such as Second Life: but the motivations are
familiar enough. The point is not that nothing is changing; the
point is that the change is not primarily at the level of human
psychology or biology but of society, of sociology. It is cultural
transmission and popular culture that are being transformed by
modern mass and new social media. Rather than speculate about a
coming “new” psychology, we need to deepen our understanding
of the psychology we already have.
None of this means that altering our physical and cognitive
environments can have no effect on our bodies and brains, or that
the evolution of the human species has ceased. Indeed, the Human
Genome Project has begun producing evidence that suggests culture itself may be a major agent of ongoing evolutionary change,
affecting some loci concerned with neurological function and
expressed in the brain (Laland, Odling-Smee, & Myles, 2010;
Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010; Eisenberg & Hayes, 2011). Nevertheless, the basics of our psychology have been sufficiently constant
to permit the members of widely separated human populations,
even populations participating in very different cultures, to communicate with and understand one another and to have children
who can assimilate fully into one another’s societies.
What Do We Mean by “Culture,” “Transmission,”
and “Popular Culture”?
“Culture” has many meanings, but at its core is almost always
the idea of a pool of information that is associated with one or
more populations. The individuals who participate in a particular
culture may or may not be geographically localized, and the
information pool is likely to overlap with others; very similar pools
may be associated with distinct polities (e.g., Canada and the
United States of America). Specific informational items are very
often to be found at multiple sites and are not necessarily discrete.
The older social science literature usually assumed that cultural
stability was the norm and could be “explained” by vague processes labeled “enculturation” or “socialization.” Those who did
focus on these processes (e.g., Kardiner & Linton, 1939; LeVine,
1
We use the term attention attraction rather than attention capture
because the latter phrase, used as it is in experimental psychology and
cognitive neuroscience, has connotations of laboratory precision not (as
yet) warranted by the theoretical framework being developed here. We use
“attraction” in its ordinary-language sense.
MEDIA SUBVERTING CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
1982) tended to be situated in the fields of culture and personality
or psychological anthropology and to be concerned primarily with
personality rather than information transmission. Students of social
change per se often accounted for the latter in terms of the
socioeconomic effects of new technology (e.g., Ogburn, 1964;
Schaniel, 1988).
We now appreciate that any theory of culture needs to account
for both stability and change (Barkow, 1989). The stability across
generations requires that at least a significant portion of the information pool be reliably acquired by younger, from older, brains
without major editing, while the change requires that new information and new editings become part of the pool. Perhaps for lack
of a better term, we typically refer to this process as “cultural
transmission.” In this article, at least, when we write “transmission” without quotation marks, we mean “information acquisition/
editing.”
“Popular culture” is a subset of culture generally identifiable
because its content tends to change with considerable speed. For
example, fashions in clothing, music, and other entertainment
apparently alter more rapidly than, for example, the values underlying religious institutions. The Internet and its social media increasingly break mass culture into overlapping social networks,
each of which has its own emblematic entertainers and fashions
and styles. The idea of a single popular culture becomes increasingly problematic, though some celebrities and entertainment
forms (e.g., rap music) can have almost global impact. Some
choose to contrast the “popular” (or “low” or “mass”) culture
associated with nonelites with the “high culture” of social elites.
For present purposes, there is no apparent reason to make this
distinction. Why some aspects of culture/popular culture appear to
be evanescent and others relatively enduring is an interesting
question for theory and research.2 In any event, in this article,
“cultural transmission” is inclusive of “transmission of popular
culture.”
“Cultural transmission” is a slippery concept because it is not
always clear when it is a metaphor and when it is not. Except in
those cases where the information is embodied in a physical
artifact that can be passed around, nothing is physically transmitted
in cultural transmission. This makes it quite different from genetic
transmission, where there is a material continuity in the DNA from
parent to offspring. Culture is composed of an unknown number of
different kinds of information, each of which may or may not be
processed differently by different brains and by different centers of
the brain; be acquired in different ways; and be influenced by the
“recipient’s” age, sex, and early experience (the last raising the
real possibility that different cultural groups may process some
kinds of information differently).
Language, for example, is clearly a form of information and
generally accepted as part of culture, but it is also distinct from
other domains of cultural information, such as those having to do
with subsistence, or with kinship, religion, or morality. The literature on language and the brain, language and biological evolution,
the structure of sound systems, grammar and syntax, language
change over historical time, and groupings of languages and their
similarities and differences is vast: Linguistics, after all, is a field
in itself— one with many subfields. But any theory of cultural
“transmission” in humans that excludes language is obviously very
incomplete. To take another example, moral development has been
an important topic in psychology at least since the work of Jean
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Piaget, and there continue to be debates about age and moral
development, cognitive models, stages, universals, and the role of
the neocortex in moral behavior (e.g., Haidt, 2007; Mesoudi &
Danielson, 2008). As with the case of language, any theory of
human culture that omitted morality would be very incomplete.
Are there other domains of cultural knowledge that may require
distinct psychological theory and data? Probably: Aspects of religious knowledge likely have their own trajectory (Atran, 2002;
Boyer, 2001), as Bering (2011) has demonstrated for beliefs in the
afterlife and ghosts. Children’s culture, today, is an area of study
in anthropology (Stephens, 1998) and may have somewhat different transmission processes than the culture of adults. The implication here is that we are not nearly ready for a general theory of
cultural transmission in humans: Our short- and even mediumterm goals should probably be multiple theories of the transmission of the various informational domains of which culture is
composed (even if the domains must be loosely defined). Any
debate worth having over the extent to which cultural transmission
is domain-general as opposed to domain-specific needs to be tied
to empirical data.
Transmission and Editing
The cultural transmission metaphor thus carries with it the risk
that its apparent simplicity can lead to misleading analogies with
other transmission processes. In electrical transmission, for example, it is electrons that are being transmitted, and we understand
this process in terms of units of power (watts), the electrical
potential difference between two points (volts), the resistance to
the passage of an electric current (Ohms), and the strength of a
current (amperage); and we understand the mathematical relationships of our units (e.g., watts ⫽ volts x amps, Ohms ⫽ volts/
amps). In genetic transmission, it is DNA that is being replicated,
and—though our understanding of the process is not as complete
as it is in the case of electricity—we can identify nucleotide
sequences and, at times, associate them with phenotypic changes,
while at the level of collectivities the mathematics of population
genetics is well known.
But culture does not “transmit” like DNA or electrons (Strimling, Enquist, & Eriksson, 2009). As we have already seen, we do
not know how many different domains of information are involved
or the extent to which different domains are processed differently
by the brain, are subject to broad age, sex and/or ethnic differences, or have a distinct developmental trajectory. What looks like
cultural “transmission” at the macro level is the result of the
cultural editing processes of the individuals comprising the population associated with the culture. But the connotational aura of
scientific understanding automatically migrates from the phrases
“electrical transmission” and “genetic transmission” to “cultural
transmission,” and we may forget that we have now moved from
well-established science to a convenient trope.
Cultural editing processes, ultimately being neurological in nature, must have a genetic component. It has long been argued that
2
Any theory of why popular culture can change so rapidly might begin
with Bourdieu’s (1984) argument that we seek to distinguish ourselves
from others: Fashion and other aspects of popular culture is one of the ways
in which we do so.
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selection for cultural capacity and culture itself evolved in a
positive reciprocal feedback relationship (Dobzhansky, 1963;
Geertz, 1962). The more culture we had, the more dependent we
grew on it, leading to increased selection for cultural capacity,
which, in turn, led to greater dependence on culture and therefore
increased genetic selection for cultural capacity, and so forth. This
simple approach has gradually been replaced by a school of
thought variously known as “dual-inheritance” or “gene– culture
coevolution” theory, the flagship volumes of which are CavalliSforza and Feldman (1981) and Boyd and Richerson (1985).3 The
latter, together with their collaborators and students, have developed a body of work devoted to building mathematical models of
cultural transmission and of gene– culture coevolution. Considerable scientific evidence exists for the reality of gene– culture
coevolution, summarized recently by Laland, Odling-Smee, and
Myles (2010) and Chudek and Henrich (2011).
Mathematical models of cultural transmission face the challenge
of somehow incorporating complex cognitive processes and the
vast array of physical environments and social relationships that
potentially affect them. These intricacies must be dramatically
simplified so that, for example, Chance’s insight into preferential
learning from those high in status (discussed later in this article
under the heading “Attention attractors as exaptations”) is converted into a “prestige” bias, tendencies toward conformity into a
“frequency-dependent” bias, and so forth. There is a tension between the simplifications inherent in mathematical modeling and
the complexities of psychological and ethnographic findings on
how people actually learn, edit, and pass on information. Current
models do not take into account the likelihood that, as was discussed under the heading of “What do we mean by ‘culture,’
transmission,’ and ‘popular culture’?”, different informational domains involve different heuristics and that the heuristics utilized
are likely to change over the life course. For example, Harris and
Corriveau (2011) find that young children make use of two heuristics to determine whom to believe, one based on the informant’s
past track record for reliability, the other on a combination of the
child’s assessment of whether that individual’s own behavior and
the information being provided are in accordance with norms with
which the child is familiar. Can such findings be incorporated into
a general model of cultural transmission? Transmission theorists
are not unmindful of the likelihood of informational and cognitive
intricacy: Work on these kinds of complexities, often under the
umbrella of “social learning strategies,” has begun to flower in
recent years (Rendell, Fogarty, et al., 2011). Indeed, these researchers explicitly explore how different cognitive processes underlying individual cultural acquisition may feed into the macroevolution of population information pools (Rendell, Boyd, et al.,
2011). Thus, as Claidière and Sperber (2007) point out, there has
already been at least some convergence between those working in
cognitive science (such as Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004) and those
following the lead of Boyd and Richerson (1985).
It can nonetheless be argued that the generalizability of current
mathematical models of cultural transmission is unknown. They
are likely to be valid only for specific, but unspecified, domains of
information in specific circumstances, rather than for all, or even
most, types of cultural information transmission. A model valid for
language transmission and change, for example, may have little
relevance for a model involving religious learning or alterations in
diet. Equally unknown is the relevance of current mathematical
models for transmission involving mass and new media. We may,
in the end, require a multiplicity of mathematical models, each
specific to a particular type of knowledge and to a specific form of
transmission. For example, we might find we need a particular
model for changes in fashion transmitted through mass media,
another model for do-it-yourself skills transmitted through interactive media (e.g., YouTube), another model for religious values
transmitted through face-to-face contact with peers, and so forth.
Information may be transmitted via multiple processes so that no
single mathematical model will necessarily be entirely accurate.
Models of the transmission of popular culture are likely to be a
subset of the myriad of potential simulations. The implications of
this critique is that we need more, rather than less, work on model
building and increased collaboration between experimentalists and
the modelers (e.g., Mesoudi, 2009; Morgan, Rendell, Ehn, Hoppitt,
& Laland, 2011). Model builders will be challenged to build into
their work the complexities found by cognitive scientists. In the
end, however, cultural “transmission” can only be the cumulative
result of cognitive processes occurring in the brains of the population of individuals participating in an information pool: Understanding human psychology is essential. The likelihood of strategic
attention and editing further complicates the challenge to transmission theorists.
Strategic Attention and Editing
Can cultural editing/acquisition be strategic in nature? It seems
inconceivable that, during our evolutionary history (and indeed,
the evolutionary history of social information use across the whole
animal kingdom), natural selection would not have favored those
individuals endowed with greater nous in how they acquire useful
information from their social environments (Laland, 2004).
Barkow (1975a, 1989) argues that human prestige systems, while
sharing a common origin with the social hierarchies of other
primates, rapidly become symbolic in nature as the individual
develops. In complex societies, multiple sets of prestige criteria
may be available, with each set associated with a particular identity, social role, and place in society. The individual may be
obliged to do a frog-and-puddle computation, because some identities and roles are ranked higher than others. So should I seek to
be a professional athlete, with a low probability that I will make it
into the top ranks, or should I be a salesperson, giving me greater
probability of higher rank but in a less prestigious arena? As
adults, we may strategically emphasize one social identity rather
than another, depending on the situation: If your garden is much
larger and more successful than mine, then I may define myself in
interaction with you as a physician who gardens as a hobby, or
perhaps talk about my skills as a sailor; but if your garden consists
of two pots on a balcony, then I may produce some photos of my
flowerbeds in bloom.
Strategic choice of the identity in terms of which one chooses to
compete for relative standing has sociopolitical, as well as psychological, implications. In fieldwork conducted during the early
1970s in the city of Maradi in Niger, Barkow (1975b, 1989) was
surprised to find that a group of traders with whom he was working
3
For a general, nonmathematical overview of the Boyd and Richerson
contributions, see Richerson & Boyd (2005).
MEDIA SUBVERTING CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
were devoting more time to studying their religion, Islam, than to
their livelihoods. He eventually concluded that the resulting resurgence of a fervent Islam had to do with the humiliation the
traders—who spoke little French— experienced every time they
had to deal with the francophone government bureaucracy. The
fonctionnaires had largely been trained at a time when they were
obliged to take the same examinations for advancement as their
counterparts in France. Among themselves, their conversation
might involve contests as to who knew, for example, most about
the rivers of France. Speaking the local language, Hausa, in an
official setting, was simply not done (as Barkow (1975b), discovered by innocently doing so). In terms of the criteria for prestige
used by the bureaucrats, the local traders were of low status
indeed. The traders appeared to be reacting by delegitimizing the
prestige of the bureaucrats, making knowledge of Islam the criterion for respect. Among themselves, they spoke scornfully of the
ignorance of the bureaucrats and, even at the expense of their
trade, spent countless hours in the study of the Quran and other
Islamic texts and in the company of the Islamic teachers, the
mallamai. In effect, cultural transmission was influenced by strategic considerations.
Barkow (1975b) does not argue that conscious strategizing was
involved, in Maradi. Nevertheless, symbolic prestige means that,
both collectively and individually, we tend to choose the game in
which we have a better chance of winning, that is, of coming out
as “really” higher status than our perceived competitors. Note that
considerations of status can apparently override economic considerations: The time the traders were spending in religious study
came, they readily stated, at the expense of their commerce.
Does anything like this happen in industrial nations? Students of
American politics have repeatedly been puzzled as to why many
middle- and working-class Americans appear to vote against their
own economic interests: They support politicians who are for
lower taxes for the affluent and against social benefits for those
who are not. Commentators such as Thomas Frank (2005) have
explained this phenomenon in terms of Republican success in
selling a narrative in which it is the scornful-of-ordinaryAmericans East Coast “liberal elites” who are to blame for America’s problems (rather than the greedy and lightly taxed, but highly
profitable, corporations). One could argue that the current rise of
the Tea Party in the United States is, in spite of its vastly different
ideology, psychologically analogous to the spread of fervent Islam
in Maradi in the 1970s because, in both cases, people are putting
aside their economic interests in favor of a narrative that bolsters
their individual self-esteem and relative social standing. In both
cases, too, they are delegitimizing the status claims of those whom
they believe consider them to be of low rank. In the Maradi case,
this strategy was encouraged by the Quranic teachers, and in the
United States, by right-wing news media controlled by the very
wealthy. Delegitimization processes need to be identified and
understood in any analysis of cultural transmission.
Another form of strategic attention involves encapsulation, defined by Foster (Foster et al., 1972, p. 185) as “mechanisms that
break complex societies into smaller, more homogenous units,
among which relationships are so ordered as to reduce the opportunity for the have-nots to envy the haves.” It is as if people in one
social category see those in another as fundamentally different
from themselves, so different that they are unlikely to envy one
another. After all, we do not envy a fish because of its superior
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swimming skills. Foster et al. (1972) argue that in socially stratified societies, such as preindependence India, the stratification can
work to mitigate envy of members of a higher caste by members
of a lower one. Barkow (1975a) suggests that encapsulation may
have operated in similar fashion in European feudal societies. If
encapsulation can block envy, can it also block cultural transmission? Specifically, can it prevent low status individuals and groups
from learning preferentially from the prestigious but encapsulated?
Is this why lower status groups apparently often fail to embrace the
popular culture of the higher status? Because this question can
only be answered by empirical investigation it will be returned to
in the section entitled “Hypotheses and Directions for Future
Research.”
Cultural acquisition and editing is a dynamic process and cannot
be understood without knowledge of how different components of
the society under study perceive one another (and knowledge of
how they perceive external and potentially rival societies is probably equally necessary). People are not passive recipients of the
cultural information around them—they may consciously or unconsciously select sources of information. Acquisition of cultural
information may be driven as much by its strategic value for its
potential recipients (users) as by the prestige of its sources. At the
same time, encapsulation may be putting information-flow barriers
between the most prestigious members of a given society and those
of lower standing. Mathematical models that simplify both individual and group interactions into cognitive biases for prestige or
conformity, and which ignore a society’s informational population
structure, may require new orders of complexity if they are to
adequately track past or current gene– culture coevolution. As was
the case with encapsulation, the issue of cultural information
attended (or not attended) to, for strategic reasons, will be returned
to in the “Hypotheses and Directions for Future Research” section.
Attention Attractors as Exaptations
Attention (as was previously discussed) is a communications
concept (Barkow, 1976): To pay attention means that a communications channel is open to accepting information. In this broad
sense, all species attend to adaptation-relevant aspects of their
environment. This would certainly have been true of the distant,
precultural ancestors of the hominin line. In evolution, new adaptations are generally presumed to have arisen from old ones. A
characteristic that was originally selected for because it had one
adaptive function may turn out to have another useful effect—such
traits are exaptations. The trait may be selected for the new effect,
which, over the generations, may come to be its major adaptive
function (Gould & Vrba, 1982). Rather than traits arising de novo,
they arise from older adaptations that, in effect, get “repurposed”
by selection (or given an additional function while retaining the
older one).
What were the old adaptations that may have served as exaptations
for cultural capacity? What ancient attentional channels were the
precursors to cultural transmission? Well, primates in general (like
other mammals) attend to signals about danger, food sources, the
needs and safety of their young, reproductive opportunities, predatorfree locations, and the location and status of conspecifics, especially
members of their own group. Michael Chance (1967, 1988; Chance &
Jolly, 1970) long ago argued that primate social hierarchies can
usefully be thought of as structures of attention: Humans and other
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primates tend to pay preferential attention to those high in status and
to learn preferentially from them.
Chance and colleagues (Barkow, 1976; Chance, 1967, 1988;
Chance & Jolly, 1970; Chance & Larsen, 1976) offered two modes
of attention/social hierarchy—the hedonic and the agonistic—and
argued that entire species may be typified by the one or the other.
As Chance and Jolly (1970, p. 177) explain, “in the hedonic mode,
display leads to ongoing but flexible social relations which can act
as the medium for the dissemination of information within the
society.” Chance (1967) labeled the mode “hedonic” because he
believed that, in species in which this type of attention was
predominant, nonthreatening display and affiliative behaviors such
as hugging and mutual grooming were more common than threat
and physical aggression. Chance and Jolly (1970) continue, “In the
agonistic mode, information transfer from one individual to another is disrupted by responses to aggression: for example, by
inflexible rank-ordered social relations” (p. 177). Hedonic attention is therefore a relaxed mode, and, in anthropomorphic terms, it
involves a relationship of respect and perhaps even affection.
Agonistic attention, in contrast, is based on fear and threat. Chance
and his collaborators argued that the two attentional modes are
associated with distinct forms of social learning. The agonistic
mode is theorized to be a constricted learning mode, suitable for
rote memory and focusing on learning whatever protects one from
punishment. The hedonic mode, by contrast, is broad and open—a
communications channel in which much can be learned, a type of
attention consistent with creativity. While this argument has considerable plausibility, it begs for empirical research.
Chance’s general argument—that we attend to and learn preferentially from those high in status— has already been supported
for our own species (DeWall & Maner, 2008; Foulsham, Cheng,
Tracy, Henrich, & Kingstone, 2010; Maner, DeWall, & Gailliot,
2008); recently, it was found that chimpanzees, too, learn preferentially from those high in status (Horner, Proctor, Bonnie,
Whiten, & de Waal, 2010). In crows, on the other hand, learning
appears to be facilitated by fear (Cornell, Marzluff, & Pecoraro,
2011). There is good evidence that fear affects learning in humans
as well (Nader & LeDoux, 1997). Öhman and Mineka (2001) have
proposed that there is a “fear module” associated with the
amygdala, which can produce learning with very different properties from non-fear-related information acquisition. The phenomenon of Twitter supports Chance’s emphasis on attention and
seems to confirm not only that prestige leads to attention—the
prestigious readily gain numerous followers— but also that attention leads to prestige, in that those with a large number of followers gain respect. At least in Twitter, being attended to and having
status seem equivalent.
Chance’s approach is open to criticism: As E. O. Wilson (1975,
p. 517) has pointed out, typifying an entire species in terms of one
side or the other of the hedonic/agonistic dichotomy is an oversimplification. Attention, after all, is not the same as social organization, crucial though it be for social learning. Probably the
social relationships of all primates include both hedonic and agonistic elements, and their relative proportions vary over time and
situation (a position Chance, 1988, specifically took for humans
and likely would have agreed with in general).
Chance’s work has been influential in the field of cultural
transmission. Barkow et al. (2001)—who argue that preferential
attention to respected, successful individuals serves to edit adap-
tive practices into cultures while editing out maladaptive “errors”—specifically cite Chance. Henrich and Gil-White (2001),
who do not refer to him, appear to have been influenced by his
work. Their distinction between social relationships based on
“prestige” versus “dominance” closely parallels Chance’s hedonic/
agonistic distinction. However, they differ from Chance in three
ways. First, they put considerably less emphasis on attention than
does Chance (though they do not ignore the topic), who places
attention at the center of his thinking, a stance since justified by
work in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Folk & Gibson, 2001; Johnson & Proctor, 2004; Posner, 2004). Second, while Chance argues
that learning takes place in both hedonic and agonistic attentional
modes, for Henrich & Gil-White (2001), social learning/cultural
transmission can only involve the hedonic (that is, “prestige”).
Chance argues that each of his two attentional modes results in a
distinct kind of learning (as we have seen). The Henrich and
Gil-White (2001) contention that prestige evolved specifically to
foster cultural transmission logically requires that dominance/
agonistic attention relationships not be involved in transmission
(otherwise, why should prestige have evolved?). Third, while both
Chance and Henrich & Gil-White (2001) are concerned with social
learning and the dissemination of information, only the latter
explicitly refer to “culture” and to “cultural transmission.” That
labeling has apparently made a difference: It is primarily the article
by Henrich & Gil-White (2001) that has, in recent years, sparked
interest in the relationship between prestige and cultural transmission, and not the primate-data-based carefully developed ideas and
corpus of work of the late Michael Chance.
We have seen that Henrich & Gil-White (2001) insist that
human prestige-seeking evolved not from the pan-primate tendency to seek social dominance, as Barkow (1975a, 1989) explicitly assumes, but from selection for facilitating cultural transmission. Note that they agree with Chance and also with Barkow
(1975a; which they do cite), and with Barkow (1989) and Barkow
et al., (2001), that we learn preferentially from the prestigious: The
disagreement is over how the trait originated. Their argument
ignores the rule in evolutionary biology, previously discussed, that
changes in function of behavior or morphology are unlikely to
arise de novo but, rather, result from selection for change in an
existing characteristic, that is, from an exaptation. If prestige
hierarchies did not evolve from primate social hierarchies, where
did they come from? Henrich & Gil-White (2001) fail to ask this
question. Fortunately, the disagreement between Barkow (1975a,
1989) and Henrich & Gil-White (2001) can be readily settled
empirically. Barkow (1975a, 1989) argues that while selection
transformed primate dominance hierarchies into human social hierarchies largely based on culturally determined sets of prestige
symbols (e.g., an expensive car, owning many cattle, publishing in
respected journals), agonism continues to underlie them. Thus,
strongly challenging the prestige of a symbolically high-ranked
human should, if Barkow (1975a, 1989) is correct, eventually
result in the usual consequences of a lower ranking primate challenging an individual of higher rank in the dominance hierarchy:
anger, agonism, and eventually perhaps indirect or even direct
physical attack. If this prediction is supported by experimental
results (say, having a student question the authority of a respected
professor), then Barkow (1975a, 1989) is right; if not, then it is
Henrich & Gil-White (2001) who are correct. (While the authors
encourage research on these competing viewpoints, they cannot
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take responsibility for the consequences of any informal experimentation.)
Role Models
One could argue that both Chance’s “hedonic mode” and Henrich & Gil-White’s (2001) “prestige bias” are reformulations of the
familiar concept of “role model.” The idea that a society’s social
structure can be considered as a pattern of positions or statuses,
with each status associated with a “role” in the sense of a set of
behaviors, dates at least back to anthropologist Ralph Linton
(1936). In psychology, there are considerable data and theory in
support of the idea that individuals can learn behavior from models, as in Bandura’s (1978) seminal article, “Social Learning
Theory of Aggression,” or in Kassin, Fein, and Markus’s (2010,
pp. 449 – 451) discussion of how models can modify behavior.
Today, the concept of “role model” is ubiquitous in the human
sciences, the media, and popular parlance. For example, Coulehan
(2011) tells us that medical students can learn humility through the
influence of role models. Van der Merwe (2011) is confident that
crime and violence in South African schools can be reduced by
teachers acting as appropriate role models. Maio, Baldacci, and
Viegi (2011) emphasize how important it is that teachers serve as
nonsmoking role models for their students. The mass media invariably castigate as “bad role models” elite athletes found to have
acted in a socially disapproved of manner (usually involving drugs,
sex, or cheating). Role models are also associated with leadership
(e.g., Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Patrick, Scrase, Ahmed, & Tombs,
2009). Few would argue that the young do not tend to imitate and
otherwise learn from those whom they admire. Chance’s work and
the evolutionary perspective in general provide a new theoretical
basis for the role model phenomenon. Presumably, in the environments in which we evolved, role models were local successes and
therefore good sources for locally relevant, fitness-enhancing behavior and information. Perhaps the kinds of empirical research
discussed later in the “Hypotheses and Directions for Future Research” section may lead to a refinement of the role model concept,
as we learn what factors affect who learns what from whom and
what kinds of relationships are associated with the learning of
which kinds of information and behavior. A new theory of role
modeling should at least in part account for the powerful influence
of media celebrities on aspects of our culture (apparently on
consumer behavior in particular, judging from the ubiquity of
“celebrity endorsements” and product placement in film).
Matthew 26:11—“The Poor You Will Always Have
With You” (but They Will Be Invisible)
Chance’s great insight into our preferential attention to those
high in status does more than provide a basis for the role model
phenomenon—it also helps us to understand both the content of
the mass media and the ubiquity of social inequality. To begin with
the former, we seem to be unable to stop paying attention to the
wealthy, the powerful, or the feared. Our demand for attention to
those high in status powers legions of paparazzi and fills blogs,
Web sites, tweets, and tabloids with the activities of celebrity
athletes, entertainers, royals, powerful politicians, and the wealthy.
Mass media and shared interest in the activities of celebrities
cement nations, in that total strangers can discuss not only the
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weather but also the enterprises of royals or celebrity entertainers
and athletes in the way that, in small towns, people can exchange
casual gossip about a neighbor. Depending on one’s age, we can
count on others knowing about Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, or Justin
Bieber, for example, just as an older generation could take for
granted that most speakers of English knew Elizabeth Taylor’s
marital history or who was in Frank Sinatra’s “rat pack.”
In contrast, those low in status are invisible. For example, for
those who consider people with disabilities to be in this group, the
person in the wheelchair is somehow difficult to focus on (Shakespeare, 1998); for a great many of us, the weak and the poor are,
frankly, hard to pay attention to. Their problems tend to provoke
more apathy than empathy in us. Traditionally, the weak are the
province of religion, which, here (and elsewhere), commands us to
act in ways contrary to our immediate inclinations. Thus, Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity enjoin us to practice charity (Hebrew,
tsedaka; Arabic, zakat; Greek, agape). In similar fashion, leftwing
and “liberal” ideologies oblige government to redistribute at least
a minimum of wealth to those most in need of it or to spend it in
providing essential services for them. But the religious and the left
wing face a hard battle because, just as our attention is magnetically drawn to those high in status, we gaze avert when it comes
to those whom we consider to be low. Chance’s insights make
much about social inequality intelligible, not for a moment excusing, but at least explaining, our tendency to neglect the needy.
Additional Attention Attractors
Can we extend Chance’s approach to attention attractors in
general? Perhaps not just attention to those high in status but all
social attention is relevant to cultural transmission/editing. As was
previously discussed, the attentional channels of our ancestors
would have been open to mate selection, dominance, threat, danger, care of offspring, and resources such as food.4 Some, or even
all, of these channels may have broadened, in our species, to
permit the acquisition and editing of highly learnable cultural
information. If so, we would expect the original attentional gateway to affect the information obtained and how it is processed and
remembered. Maner and his collaborators (Maner, Gailhot, &
DeWall, 2007; Maner, Gailliot, Rouby, & Miller, 2007; Maner et
al., 2003, 2006) have shown that physical attractiveness draws our
attention (another finding unlikely to surprise; attractiveness attracts), but they do not address the issue of whether such attention
represents an exaptation for culture, that is, whether it opens an
information gate that leads to knowledge acquisition and editing.
Perhaps it would be surprising if it did not open such a gate:
Evidence of the importance of physical attractiveness keeps on
accumulating. For example, we know that even 3-month-olds
prefer to look at attractive faces (Langlois et al., 1987), that
attractive people are more effective at persuading others (Pallak,
4
Kenrick and his collaborators (Kenrick et al, 2010) present a theory of
fitness-relevant motivations, each of which produces a range of situationrelevant behaviors. In terms of their approach, an attention attractor would
likely be a stimulus that elicited a specific motivation that, in turn, affected
attention and memory in ways likely to have enhanced fitness in earlier
environments. The attention-attractor perspective, arguably, is a tool specialized for aiding our understanding of cultural transmission/editing, in
contrast to Kenrick’s broader framework.
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BARKOW, O’GORMAN, AND RENDELL
Murroni, & Koch, 1983), that attractive politicians get more votes
(Berggren, Jordahl, & Poutvaara, 2010), and that both attractive
children and adults are judged and treated more positively than the
unattractive (Langlois et al., 2000). Recent books by sociologist
Catherine Hakim (2011) and by economist Daniel Hamermesh
(2010) emphasize the social and economic advantages accruing to
physical attractiveness.
Attention attractors are typified by three characteristics. First,
they can involve any or multiple sensory modalities—sound,
smell, and so forth (though our present interest in media leads us
to emphasize the auditory and visual). Second, unlike even our
closest relatives, some attractors found in humans are dependent
on language and meaning. We have apparently been selected for a
sort of secondary set of attractors: You may shout and the loudness
will attract my immediate attention, but it is the content of what
you are shouting that may trigger an additional (secondary) attention attractor. Thus, a shout of “Help, there’s a bear in my tent!”
will elicit very different cognitive processing and behavior than a
shout of “Supper’s ready!” Third, the effect of an attention attractor may have as much or more to do with the state of its recipient
as with its source: My already being hungry, angry, sexually
aroused, in an envious mood, or frightened will affect my response
(Ariely, 2010; Ford et al., 2010; Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius,
Becker, & Schaller, 2010; Hill, DelPriore, & Vaughan, 2011).
Social attention usually implies some sort of relationship between the one paying and the one receiving attention. In the case
of the mass media and mass society in general, these are often
parasocial or one-way relationships. Barkow (1989, p. 118)
writes,
Nowadays, the professional entertainers and politicians about whom
we frequently gossip and read about so avidly are “strangers”: but
somehow they do not feel [emphasis in the original] like strangers to
us. The modern media serve to convince many of us that the important
people in “our” group are individuals whom we have never in fact met
and who, often enough, are soap-opera personalities with no objective
existence at all. . .such being the power of film, TV, and the press.
Kanazawa (2002) strengthens this theorizing with some empirical research. He finds that
watching certain types of TV shows has the same effect on subjective
satisfaction with friendships as does having friends and socializing
with them more often. This is consistent with my contention that the
human brain has difficulty distinguishing real friends and people they
see on TV, because TV did not exist in the EEA [environment of
evolutionary adaptedness], where every realistic image of someone
you repeatedly and routinely saw was your real “friend.” (Kanazawa,
2002, p. 171)
Even when presented with still photographs, we apparently
make lightning-fast judgments about individuals and how we
might relate to them, in effect forming instant parasocial relationships (Armstrong, Green, Jones, & Wright, 2010; Ballew & Todorov, 2007). Arguably, parasocial relationships may have begun
with the first anthropomorphic supernatural figures— gods, guardian spirits, and so forth. Earlier media revolutions involving printing and subsequent mass literacy may have promoted parasocial
relationships with authors or with fictional characters. But the
immediacy of newer information-delivery systems, particularly
visual ones like TV and motion pictures, and, more recently, the
interactive nature of new media (e.g., computer games), make
these far more likely to “fool” the brain into one-way relationships
than did the older media.
But could it be that it is simply attention per se, regardless of
mode or trigger (attractor), that affects the acquisition/editing of
information? Jane Goodall (1988) tells the story of the chimpanzee
Mike, who achieved high status by banging empty kerosene cans
together: Do celebrities who are primarily famous for being famous (e.g., Paris Hilton), or entertainers like Lady Gaga, whose
meat suit and similar escapades have arguably yielded more attention from the public than her actual singing, nevertheless serve as
sources of information? Though it does admittedly seem unlikely,
it is possible that the so-called prestige bias could turn out to be
nothing more than a special case of a general attention bias, with
all kinds of attention equally likely to result in social learning and
cultural transmission. Once again, we have a question best resolved in the laboratory.
Hypotheses and Directions for Future Research
The proof of the pudding of new theory is in the testable
hypotheses it generates. We discuss some of the hypotheses and
research the attention attractor approach leads to, with the emphasis on hypotheses relevant to the transmission of culture and
popular culture. In some cases, there already exist research findings that might profit from being reinterpreted from an attention
attractor perspective.
Hypotheses Stemming From the Work of
Michael Chance
As Michael Chance was the pioneer in the study of social
hierarchy and learning, it seems appropriate to begin by building
on his work. His core hypotheses are that, given social hierarchy,
(a) we learn preferentially from those high in status; (b) when the
status relationship is agonistic, what we learn is restricted to what
is likely to result in the avoidance of punishment; and (c) when the
status relationship is hedonic, we learn more and varied things than
when it is agonistic. Operationally, these hypotheses could be
tested in many ways. For example, film clips might be used,
showing two or more characters of unequal rank interacting, with
the viewers as the research participants. An eye tracker could test
the hypothesis of preferential attention to those high in status,
while some kind of recall task or inventory of questions would
evaluate from which character the viewers learned more (or at least
those that they learned more about). For those interested in cultural
transmission, the viewers could then be asked to summarize what
happened for friends on Facebook or Twitter (or in the next room),
in order to evaluate whether what was learned was what was
passed on. Independent variables involving the traits of the characters would include whether the relationship between (among)
them was hedonic or agonistic, their relative ages, ethnicity, religion, and sex (that is, whether the characters were of the same sex,
different sexes, and what the sex of the individual[s] of higher
status was). Possible control variables are similar, that is, the
viewers could be varied with respect to age, ethnicity, sex, religion, and social class, and possibly level of self-esteem. Researchers could also test hypotheses concerning physical size and attention and social learning/transmission simply by using actors of
MEDIA SUBVERTING CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
different sizes, or might, in similar fashion, study the effects of
facial hair.
Chance did not hypothesize about secondary attention attractors,
that is, the effect of content on what is learned. However, Barkow
(1992) introduced the notion of our attention being attracted by the
evolutionarily relevant information roughly covered by the
English-language folk term, “gossip.” These are the topics variously reported in studies of newspaper headlines, talk shows, and
ordinary gossip (Barkow, 1992; Davis & McLeod, 2003; Schwender, 2001). Examples of gossip subjects involve the health,
sexual activities, status and reputational changes, and friendship/
alliances of fellow group members; dangers; animal behavior; and
sources of resources. These may be considered “secondary” attention attractors because (as was pointed out earlier) attention must
be first attracted by the individual providing the information and
only then to what is being said. The evolutionary study of gossip
has become almost a subfield of evolutionary psychology (e.g.,
Baumeister, Zhang, & Vohs, 2004; Hess & Hagen, 2006; De
Backer, Nelissen, Vyncke, Braeckman, & McAndrew, 2007;
McAndrew, Bell, & Garcia, 2007; McAndrew & Milenkovic,
2002). There is convincing experimental evidence that gossip is
part of the process of cultural transmission (Baumeister, Zhang, &
Vohs, 2004; Mesoudi, Whiten, & Dunbar, 2006).
The film-clip experimental design previously suggested for
evaluating some of the ideas of Michael Chance lends itself to the
study of secondary attention attractors. The number of permutations potentially produced by varying both the contents of the
“conversation” between the two individuals interacting in a film
clip and their personal characteristics (as previously discussed) is
immense, though some have more theoretical significance than
others. However, the methods used in gossip research avoid the
production of film clips. For example, De Backer, Nelissen, and
Fisher (2007) created stories about fictional characters and subsequently gave their research participants a surprise recall test on
their contents.
Research on celebrity gossip is particularly well suited for the
study of secondary attractors and popular culture. For example,
one could ask whether research participants remembered different
things about celebrities perceived as high on the agonistic mode
than they do for those whom they perceive as high on the hedonic
mode. Transmission hypotheses could readily be tested by, for
example, asking respondents to tweet to a “friend” what they know
about a given celebrity. De Backer, Nelissen, Vyncke, Braeckman,
and McAndrew (2007) tap research participants’ existing knowledge of celebrities. They find that young people use celebrities as
a source of adaptive information, while older people tend to have
parasocial (one-way, friendship-like) relationships with them. This
kind of approach lacks the direct information about visual attention
that film clips and eye-tracker methods can supply, but this is not
necessarily a problem, as not all attention, of course, is visual.
Could it be that it is only attention per se, regardless of what
attracts it, that is associated with information transmission? If so,
then perhaps both the Chance approach and the argument for a
variety of attention attractors being involved in cultural transmission are false. The following hypothesis is worthy of testing:
Respondents who perceive specific celebrities as low in both kinds
of status, and also low in sexual attractiveness, will nevertheless
hold much information about them. Assuming the respondents are
being truthful, data supporting this hypothesis would cast doubt on
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whether the nature of the attention paid makes any difference—
noise-generated attention might be enough. It would be interesting
to compare respondents’ extent of knowledge about, say, Paris
Hilton, with extent of knowledge about celebrities who have
objectively achieved much, as measured, say, in terms of formal,
competitive awards.
Hypotheses Drawn From Ethnographic Research
Do self-esteem and prestige trump economic self-interest? Earlier, we summarized ethnographic work supporting this contention.
To examine this hypothesis experimentally, we might use a game
strategy in which the players had to choose between a course of
action that enhanced prestige and a course that gave them money.
For example, research participants could be asked to rank professional sports teams in terms of the extent to which they were
prestigious, and then be asked to rank offers of contracts to play
with the teams. The researchers would ensure that the most prestigious teams would offer the lowest salary, and the prediction
would be that, ceteris paribus, people would go for prestige rather
than money. No doubt there are many other ways to test the
prestige/self-esteem versus economic reward conundrum, and no
doubt, too, much more nuanced, data-driven theory is needed. Of
course, cross-cultural research would be necessary in order to
determine if the results reflected our evolved psychology as opposed to local cultural values.
A related question has to do with the delegitimation strategies
discussed earlier: Do we strategically devalue prestige spheres in
which we ourselves rank low, while valorizing those in which we
believe we do better? Experimentally, researchers could first ask a
panel of participants to rank themselves in terms of actual and
desirable skill or knowledge in a number of spheres (e.g., particular sports, particular academic areas and subjects, home repair
skills, cooking). Subsequently, they would be asked to evaluate the
social rank of a number of individuals after reading their crafted
summary biographies. These narratives would include their subject’s areas of strength and weakness. The hypothesis is that the
more closely the strengths of an individual presented resemble
those of a particular panel member, the higher the rank that panel
member will ascribe to the individual. A different approach would
involve asking research participants (or survey respondents) to
check off the traits they believe typical of a supporter of a specific
political party or group. They would then be asked to rank these
traits in terms of relative importance, and, finally, they would be
asked to rate their own level of support for that group. The
strategizing hypothesis discussed earlier would predict that traits
associated with voters for a supported political group would receive a high ranking, and those associated with a nonsupported
group, a low one.
Foster et al.’s (1972) idea of encapsulation (discussed previously) implies that we do not envy those whom we perceive as
vastly different from ourselves. In the present context, the relevant
hypothesis is that, regardless of relative status, we learn less from
individuals whom we see as very different from ourselves, or as
belonging to social categories we consider incommensurable with
our own membership categories. This hypothesis is certainly compatible with the familiar finding in the psychological literature that
perceived similarity facilitates social learning (e.g., Brown, 1974;
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BARKOW, O’GORMAN, AND RENDELL
Schunk, 1987). The findings of such research would no doubt have
implications for educational institutions.
Additional Attention-as-Exaptation Hypotheses
Did sexual attractiveness serve as an exaptation for cultural
transmission? That is, do we now learn preferentially from those
high in attractiveness? What is the role of attractiveness in the
dissemination of popular culture? The research approaches discussed here in connection with the ideas of Michael Chance can
readily be converted to help answer this question: We simply
substitute a rating for physical attractiveness in place of relative
rank in a social hierarchy. Much research already exists on sexual
attractiveness (e.g., Berry, 2000; Maner et al., 2003; Symons,
1995), and the point would not be to replicate findings that we pay
preferential attention to the high in male or female beauty (of
course we do) but to determine whether we learn preferentially
from the attractive and subsequently transmit that information to
others. The video-clip experimental design previously suggested
for studying status/attention hypotheses could easily be adapted for
such research. Clips could be prepared showing both high- and
low-in-beauty individuals saying and doing exactly the same
things, with a recall task followed by a “What would you Twitter
to others?” question used to test information transmission hypotheses. It would be interesting to compare the information acquired
and transmitted from those high in beauty with the information
acquired from those high in status. Judging from the findings of De
Backer, Nelissen, Vyncke, et al. (2007), there would be some
overlap. Even what De Backer, Nelissen, and Fisher (2007) refer
to as “reputational gossip” may actually be reinforcing or otherwise editing relatively enduring social norms and values.
Youth is another attention attractor, as is infancy (Glocker et al.,
2009). It seems unlikely that the “cuteness” (caregiving, protective) response young children elicit could have served as an
exaptation for cultural transmission, but it is not impossible: There
may be knowledge domains having to do with the needs, care of,
and danger to young children that are learned via the attention we
pay children. For example, we would hypothesize that, given two
film clips showing identical care being provided, but one clip
featuring an infant or young child receiving the care and the other
an adult, we would recall the former more fully and be better able
to transmit that information to others. Of course, it would be
necessary to design the experiment so as to permit controlling for
the likelihood that we simply pay more attention to those of our
own sex and approximate age than to others (as McAndrew &
Milenkovic, 2002, found for interest in gossip).
A Sociological Hypothesis
Some communities, and even societies, are more culturally and
socially stable than are others. Religious communities provide
examples, for example, Mennonites, Hassidic Jews, and Amish
(Boynton, 1986; Hostetler, 1993). Arguably, at least, small, conservative towns in rural North America may also be more stable
than large cities. Let us assume, for the moment, that the Chance
framework is accurate. In that case, people in such relatively stable
societies (particularly young people) should be paying more attention to members of their own community than they do to outsiders
compared with a matching sample of respondents from a less
culturally stable society. In the one case, we should find high status
individuals and celebrities to be local, or at least members of the
same cultural community; in the other case, they should tend to be
nonlocal or members of other communities. For example, in a
stable rural community, the local high school athletes might be
considered celebrities, while in the matching, nonstable sample,
local athletes would not be.5 What we would be examining here
(perhaps via survey research methods) is whether resistance to the
mass media promotes cultural and social stability.
Conclusions
We do not have an unequivocal answer to the title question,
“Are the new mass media subverting cultural transmission?” We
have something better (at least for the researcher, if not for the
journalist): We have better questions. These new questions arise
from theory and research; in some cases, we even have suggestions
for methods to use in order to answer them. In no particular order,
here are some of the researchable issues arising from this article:
• If the acquisition/editing of some cultural informational domains is being influenced by the new and mass media, which
domains are being influenced and how? Which ones are not being
influenced and why?
• What are the sex and age differences in how people acquire
and edit information from the new and mass media?
• To what extent does perception of another as belonging to a
different social category impede cultural transmission?
• When a mathematical model of gene– culture coevolution is
generated, to which informational domain(s) and age/sex groups
does it apply?
• Can mathematical models of gene– culture coevolution take
account of the informational population structure, including the
effects of encapsulation and delegitimation?
• Are the cognitive processes involved in the transmission of
popular culture different from those involved in the acquisition and
editing of more enduring layers of cultural information?
• Does the popular culture transmission process stabilize, reinforce, or edit cultural norms and values?
• What role do attention attractors other than preferential attention to those high in status, such as attractiveness, play in the
acquiring and editing of cultural information?
• Does the attention attracted by infants and young children
facilitate the learning of child care?
• Is all attention equal when it comes to cultural transmission,
so that the effects of such attention attractors as beauty, status, and
conspicuousness are the same?
• How do individuals and communities differ in how they
assess status and prestige, and how do these differences influence
the acquisition and editing of cultural information?
• Are communities in which the high status figures are local
more socially and culturally stable than are other communities?
• Under what circumstances do individuals pursue activities and
identities that enhance self-esteem and local prestige at the expense of economic self-interest, and how do such strategies influence culture acquisition and editing?
5
These ideas arose in a discussion between Barkow and Shea Balish,
currently an interdisciplinary doctoral student at Dalhousie University.
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131
• Can cultural transmission research and the attention attractor
framework provide a new theoretical basis for the concept of role
model?
• If humans pay involuntary attention to those high in status,
does the inverse of this statement—that we tend not to pay attention to those low in status—account in part for the ubiquity of
neglect for the poor, the weak, and the oppressed?
what appears to be considerable and rapid culture change almost
everywhere, and we are also seeing the mass and, to a lesser extent,
new media almost everywhere, and it is implausible that there is no
connection at all. This article’s theoretical discussion is a call for
more theory and research on the cognitive processes involved in
cultural transmission.
Perhaps there is a parallel between cultural transmission research and climatology. Global warming has given a new impetus
and importance to the latter field; perhaps unpredictable, rapid
sociocultural change will do the same for the former. In any event,
the need for basic empirical research on the psychology of cultural
transmission is clear.
Let us suppose, for a moment, that Michael Chance’s ideas
about our having been selected for preferential learning from those
high in status are accurate. If so, then much becomes less murky.
As was suggested earlier, it would then appear that modern media
do indeed devalue the coin of local prestige, so that instead of
attending to and learning from our own parents or other family
members and from the local dignitaries of our communities, the
local successes, we now learn preferentially from personages presented by the media. Confusion about who and what is prestigious
may even be leaving young people vulnerable to recruiters who
use social media to capture attention, presenting to their targets
their own religion- or ideology-based strategies for gaining prestige and recognition, perhaps deliberately transmitting beliefs and
values that, in some cases, involve incitement to commit terrible
violence. Even for those not so confused, the most powerful
attention-attracting figures in contemporary society are celebrities,
and most celebrities (other than athletes) are professional entertainers. It is not just that celebrities are nonlocal, not just that they
distract our attention from realistic and socially valuable local
strategies for accomplishment, it is also that celebrities are often,
in whole or at least in part, fictitious. The public images of these
personalities tend to be crafted by professional publicists. Lady
Gaga and Paris Hilton are calculated creations, human “Mikes,”
with electronically amplified designer kerosene cans. The public
images of politicians and sports figures are similarly spun by
experts in public relations. Celebrities need only be psychologically authentic to their audience, and, for some of us, Captain Kirk
or the various incarnations of James Bond are real enough to
capture our attention. As our younger generations learn preferentially from these nonlocal and often entirely or partially fictional,
but always attention-attracting, figures, parents may find their
children’s behavior incomprehensible. Parental and community
values and goals and the strategies for attaining them may not be
transmitted. For lack of locally relevant cultural information, individuals may attempt to reach default goals of wealth and prestige
through crime (or, slightly less alarmingly, by forming their own
rock bands or by becoming rappers). Young people can readily
recite the romances and rehabs of celebrities but may not know
what the neighbors do for a living.
But perhaps the preceding paragraph is simply a rant with little
truth to it. Until we do the basic research on how culture and
popular culture get acquired and edited, we will not know. Mass
and new media may have usurped some segments of the process of
cultural transmission, but certainly not all of it—parents and playmates and local community remain important. Still, we are seeing
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Received February 8, 2012
Revision received February 8, 2012
Accepted February 22, 2012 䡲