Continuities and discontinuities in the cultural evolution of global consciousness

Abstract

Global consciousness (GC), encompassing cosmopolitan orientation, global orientations (i.e. openness to multicultural experiences) and identification with all humanity, is a relatively stable individual difference that is strongly associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, less ingroup favouritism and prejudice, and greater pandemic prevention safety behaviours. Little is known about how it is socialized in everyday life. Using stratified samples from six societies, socializing institution factors correlating positively with GC were education, white collar work (and its higher income) and religiosity. However, GC also decreased with increasing age, contradicting a ‘wisdom of elders’ transmission of social learning, and not replicating typical findings that general prosociality increases with age. Longitudinal findings were that empathy-building, network-enhancing elements like getting married or welcoming a new infant, increased GC the most across a three-month interval. Instrumental gains like receiving a promotion (or getting a better job) also showed positive effects. Less intuitively, death of a close-other enhanced rather than reduced GC. Perhaps this was achieved through the ritualized management of meaning where a sense of the smallness of self is associated with growth of empathy for the human condition, as a more discontinuous or opportunistic form of culture-based learning. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions

“…The global transfer of cultural elements today is beyond that of any other era, with internet connectivity increasingly ubiquitous. Perhaps such between-group cultural transmission could facilitate the emergence of a global social identity which could support the development of necessary global sustainability traits (see [113]). However, between-group transmission may often reinforce cultural group selection [20], which is centrally implicated in the cumulative cultural evolution of extractive traits including fossil fuel technology.…”

Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis

“…Tthe human species has been conceptualized as a global force of change even before the seminal early works of Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin on the Noosphere [22,135,136], and much longer before our interaction with recent new forms of technology [127,137,138]. Several conceptions of global sustainability clearly indicate a transition in how humans behave as a cultural species at the planetary scale (figure 4).…”

“…How might such a 'global consciousness' evolve? Zhang et al [127] explore this possibility with an empirical study of correlates of a psychological construct which is associated with both pro-environmental behaviour and identification with all humanity, termed 'global consciousness' (GC). The authors report results from a cross-cultural study finding that GC increases with education and religion, decreases with age and that various life events, such as promotion, death and marriage, all can help increase expressions of global awareness in the short term.…”

Long-distance social relationships can both undercut and promote local natural resource management

“…They can be costly: people may not have the time or resources to form them even if they want to [50], and institutions themselves can prohibit them [53]. However, when long-distance relationships are important to risk management, individuals may be more interested in forming them [38,54], and group-level institutions often evolve to support them [44,50]—for example, through norms that lower the cost of long-distance relationships by reducing transaction costs [53,54] or by brokering long-distance relationships that benefit all community members, e.g. through middlemen [55,56].…”

“…These risk-management relationships can include phenomena like trans-local ties (e.g. locality to locality connections across borders [27]), long ties (which bridge social networks [34]) and the ties maintained by individuals high on cosmopolitanism or global consciousness, or with superordinate or global identities [35][36][37][38].…”