Cultural change through niche construction: A multilevel approach to investigate the interplay between cultural change and infectious disease.

Abstract

Researchers theorize cultural change as societal adaptation to the environment. But where does the environment come from? Here we advance conceptual and analytical tools for a more dynamic framework of cultural change and emphasize that people create their own environment, to which they adapt through cultural change. First, we draw on the theory of niche construction to argue that organisms modify their environments in ways that impact their own evolution. Second, we advocate for a multilevel approach to analyze heterogeneity of longitudinal processes across multiple units: cultural change can be understood as a within-society process nested within higher-level units that differ across space. We then apply a multilevel distributed lag/lead model to identify the reciprocal causation between ecology and culture. We demonstrate these points by analyzing how cultural changes in individualism and economic prosperity are associated with changing prevalence of tuberculosis (TB, 1993(TB, -2018 and sexually transmitted diseases (STD, 1984(STD, -2014 across 50 U.S. states. We found evidence for reciprocal causation: (a) Increases in individualism and economic prosperity followed reduction of disease prevalence, and (b) cultural change in those variables decreased TB but increased STD. Moreover, historically collectivistic states were more successful at amplifying the positive impacts of cultural change on reducing TB and attenuating harmful effects of cultural change on increasing STD. In discussion, we encourage a more dynamic approach and expand a range of questions for future research on cultural change.

We built this culture (so we can change it): Seven principles for intentional culture change.

“…An ongoing limitation, for psychologists and other social scientists, is that it is quite challenging to measure cultural change comprehensively, and most research does not capture all levels, processes, and time points within one study or article. While researchers have been making strides in developing metrics to assess other forms of cultural dynamics, these studies often examine incidental cultural changes or changes over longer timescales (e.g., Götz et al, 2021; Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021; Ma et al, 2023). Studying intentional culture change will also necessarily involve examining behavioral, organizational, and societal change processes in the field; using data or big data collected in real-world, naturalistic settings; and collaborating with organizations and communities to investigate timely, high-impact issues.…”

Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference

“…Enculturation instead can be seen as niche construction: the process describing how some living beings, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other's niches. A niche refers to the specific natural selection and evolutionary pressures a living being is subject to in its local environment (Odling-Smee et al, 2003;Sterelny, 2012;Laland et al, 2016;Kusano and Kemmelmeier, 2021). Enactivist accounts bring forth a world in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction (Rolla and Figueiredo, 2021).…”

The psychology of cultural change: Introduction to the special issue.

“…Some of the articles in this special issue focus on the "What" of cultural change-documenting shifts in specific phenomena such as prejudice (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021), mental health (Infurna et al, 2021), individualism (Hamamura et al, 2021), social mobility (Chan et al, 2021), and religious beliefs and practices (Jackson et al, 2021). Other articles focus on the "Why"-testing theories regarding the causes of specific cultural changes, such as shifts over time in levels of individualism (Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021), or openness (Götz et al, 2021), or fertility (Rotella et al, 2021). Finally, the special issue includes articles that tackle the "How"-attempts to model and capture the broad processes involved in cultural change writ large.…”

“…The present issue draws together new work on cultural change from scholars from a variety of areas within psychology (including social, personality, cultural, developmental, and quantitative psychology), and beyond (e.g., sociology and data science). These pieces capture a range of theoretical perspectives that have been brought to bear on how and why cultures change over time, including insights from evolutionary psychology (Jackson et al, 2021; Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021; Pan et al, 2021), behavioral ecology (Rotella et al, 2021), cultural evolution (Schaller & Muthukrishna, 2021), and socioecological psychology (Buttrick & Oishi, 2021). The special issue also highlights the diversity of methodological approaches in this emerging field ranging from computational modeling (Jung et al, 2021; Schaller & Muthukrishna, 2021; Pan et al, 2021), to machine learning (Sheetal & Savani, 2021; Stavrova et al, 2021), to time series analyses (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021; Chan et al, 2021; Götz et al, 2021; Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021; Rotella et al, 2021).…”