In: Economics
Some elements of shared culture may be called as a consequence of individual-level cognitive mechanisms. That are themselves widely shared within any human population, many other fundamental components of culture emerge as a consequence of - and are sustained by - interpersonal communication.
Just as the hands of a potter mold rather than make the clay, repeated acts of communication shape those raw materials into the ultimate form that culture takes. There are various ways in which the psychology of interpersonal communication creates and shapes human culture.
Communication is integral to the very concept of culture itself. Although strict definitions of culture vary widely from scholar to scholar, many cultural scholars explicitly define culture as something shared among people who communicate with each other through some common language, and which is further communicated to immigrants, children, and other new members of society.
The specific means of transmission may be varied, encompassing everything from mere mimicry to complicated constructions of symbolic language, but the basic defining principle remains: Some form of information transmission - communication - is assumed whenever we talk about culture.
This assumption is evident in the fact that human cultures are intimately connected to language; and language, of course, is one of the primary means through which people communicate.
Although all human languages have pronoun words, these pronouns are more likely to be dropped - implied rather than actually spoken - in the languages spoken by people in collectivistic cultures.
While these and related empirical findings cannot disentangle the causal relations between language and cultural world views, they do illustrate the deep connection that language and culture share.
SOCIAL COMMUNICATION to transform the culture from a population-level abstraction into an individual-level psychological reality. This brief discussion of the intimate connection between culture and language simply offers one means of underscoring a fundamental point of departure: A complete understanding of culture is impossible without considering the social psychology of interpersonal communication.
Some scholars have argued that not only is communication a necessary feature of culture, but communication by itself is sufficient to account for the emergence of culture. Culture is considered to be something that is transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation.
Most people understand a culture to be: a set of beliefs, customs, symbols, or characteristics that is shared by one population of people and is different from the set of beliefs, customs, symbols, or characteristics shared by other distinct populations.
When Sperber wrote that "Culture is the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population," we suspect that he was writing both to an audience of anthropologists and to an audience of psychologists. For this audience, Sperber's words represent an invitation to consider more deeply the individual- and interpersonal-level mechanisms that give rise to and sustain cultures over time.