Cultural transmission and social control of human behavior |
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Authors: | Laureano Castro Luis Castro-Nogueira Miguel A Castro-Nogueira Miguel A Toro |
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Institution: | 1.Centro Asociado de Madrid,UNED,Madrid,Spain;2.Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Departamento de Sociología I,UNED,Madrid,Spain;3.Departamento de Producción Animal, ETS Ingenieros Agrónomos,Ciudad Universitaria,Madrid,Spain |
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Abstract: | Humans have developed the capacity to approve or disapprove of the behavior of their children and of unrelated individuals.
The ability to approve or disapprove transformed social learning into a system of cumulative cultural inheritance, because
it increased the reliability of cultural transmission. Moreover, people can transmit their behavioral experiences (regarding
what can and cannot be done) to their offspring, thereby avoiding the costs of a laborious, and sometimes dangerous, evaluation
of different cultural alternatives. Our thesis is that, during ontogeny, the evaluative communication (approval/disapproval)
between parents and offspring is substituted by other evaluative communications among peers, like individuals of the same
generation. Each person belongs to a reference social group with individuals that interact more intensively. Humans have developed
psychological mechanisms that enable cultural transmission by being receptive to parental advice as well as their reference
social group. The selective pressure that promoted these new evaluative interactions arose to facilitate the establishment
of efficient cooperative relationships. In short, the social control of behavior is essential to understand human cultural
transmission. |
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