The perpetuation of an arbitrary tradition through several generations of a laboratory microculture.

Abstract

ORBING to Sumner (1906) "the mores can make anything right," and he went on to illustrate with a chapter on sacral harlotry and child sacrifice. According to Tarde (1903) "imitation is the key to the social mystery," "society is imitation," "social man is a veritable somnambulist." Such quotations indicate the late 19th century awareness of the power of culture to perpetuate arbitrary beliefs. Less drastically expressed, some such perspective permeates present day social science, although tempered somewhat by functionalism in anthropology and sociology. In social psychology, for example, cultural tradition tends to be invoked primarily as an "explanation" for social evils, prejudice, resistance to ameliorative social change, and the like. The current emphasis upon conformity reinforces this view, in spite of Asch's (1952) demurrer. Yet there are, no doubt, restraints upon a complete arbitrariness to culture, particularly with regard to beliefs that lie within people's direct range of observation. Thus arbitrary and erroneous superstitions about the shape of fishhooks probably would not long survive the systematic drift pressures resulting from continual minor variations some of which are in the direction of noticeably more effective form. Here lies the problem in the theory of culture for which a laboratory analogue was sought.Since Sherif's (1936) classic studies on the formation of "social norms" in laboratory groups, there have been sporadic efforts to bring the process of cultural transmission into the laboratory. While much small group research might be so interpreted, the present study was in particular inspired by Sherif's studies, by Rose and Felton's (1955) "experimental histories of culture," and by the preliminary report of experiments on the evolution of "microcultures" by Gerard, Kluckhohn, and Rapoport (1956). In the

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

“…One method for simulating cultural evolution was developed by Gerard et al (1956) and Jacobs and Campbell (1961). A norm or bias is established in a group of participants, usually by using confederates, and one by one these participants are replaced with new, untrained participants.…”

“…Jacobs and Campbell's (1961) replacement method has been used to study the transmission of food preferences in rats (Galef & Allen 1995) and route preference in guppies (Laland & Williams 1997;.…”

The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

“…Sherif 's (1936) now-classic finding was that the majority of participants gave similar estimates to the confederates despite that estimate being patently false, illustrating the powerful effect of conformity in group settings. Jacobs & Campbell (1961) repeated Sherif's (1936) experiment with the additional step that, after the group had made their estimates, one group member was replaced with a new naive participant and the new group estimated again. Significant evidence of the artificially introduced norm remained for about four or five generations following the replacement of all of the confederates, after which the perceptual judgement tended to return to that exhibited by naive control groups.…”

“…As an illustrative example, Jacobs & Campbell (1961) used the replacement method to study the conformist transmission of artificially exaggerated judgements of an ambiguous perceptual illusion. In an earlier study by Sherif (1936), participants responded to a perceptual illusion in which a stationary point of light in an otherwise pitch-black room is perceived as constantly moving by a few centimetres.…”

The importance of heritability in psychological research: The case of attitudes.

“…Some exquisite pioneering work was done by Muzafer Sherif (1937), who showed that in the absence of any objective referent, people will adopt the judgments of those around them. They appeared to do so without being aware that they were being influenced, and they continued to use the adopted judgments even in the absence of continued social influence (but see Jacobs & Campbell, 1961). At the opposite end of the continuum, Solomon Asch (1956) attempted to show that when making judgments about stimuli that were unambiguous, people would show their independence.…”