Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

8 Dealing with Culture as Inherited Information

Luke J. Matthews

Behavioral and Policy Sciences, RAND Corporation, Boston, MA, 02116, USA

Galton's Problem as a Core Feature of Cultural Theory

Improving models for social behavior eventually will require dealing with culture theoretically and empirically and in the statistical models that link theory and evidence. Developing ways to meaningfully include culture could increase the validity and credibility of social‐behavioral modeling. Culture is theorized to be inherited information that influences beliefs and behaviors and that is acquired through social learning (Cavalli‐Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Laland and Kendal 2003; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Dean et al. 2014; Henrich 2015; Mesoudi et al. 2016). This conception of culture is accepted by nearly all researchers working today on culture who employ a generally scientific approach, by which I mean striving to operationalize measurements of culture and to test hypotheses about how it operates. Yes, most scientific cultural researchers also do a great deal of qualitative research that may be solely descriptive rather than oriented toward testing hypotheses, but they do not see this solely descriptive work as an end point for the scientific study of culture.

The idea that culture is socially inherited information in fact characterizes even Edward B. Tylor's first definition of culture: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic ...