The psychological foundations of culture

Abstract

The conceptual unification of the sciences requires an Integrated Causal Model to replace the prevailing Standard Social Science Model, which erroneously treats culture as an autonomous, self-caused system. The human psychological architecture is not a content-independent, general-purpose learning system but a collection of evolved, domain-specific information-processing mechanisms. These adaptations were produced by natural selection to solve recurring ancestral problems, such as mate selection, language acquisition, and social cooperation. Because content-free architectures are computationally insufficient to resolve the frame problem or combinatorial explosion, human cognition must be guided by specialized frames that impose species-typical structure on environmental input. Consequently, culture is the manufactured product of these evolved mechanisms interacting with social and ecological variables. This framework distinguishes between metaculture, arising from species-typical universals; evoked culture, resulting from universal mechanisms triggered by local environmental conditions; and epidemiological culture, formed through the inferential reconstruction of representations between individuals. By grounding social phenomena in the evolved structure of the human mind, the social sciences can be reconciled with the natural sciences and the broader evolutionary history of life. – AI-generated abstract.