Culture and Human Social Life: CULTURE DEFINED

Culture is thus an advanced way of being social. If we think of evolution as proceeding from simple creatures

Culture is harder to define than nature. (In fact, Boyd and Richerson, 1985, listed 164 different definitions of culture that different thinkers have used!) Th e term originally referred to a system of farming (a usage one can still see in terms like agriculture). Then it came to refer to musical and artistic achievements, such as paintings and symphonies. Social scientists eventually began to use the term to refer to what a large group of people has in common. French culture, for example, refers to everything that French people share: language, values, food preferences, a style of government, a place (France), and a shared sense of connection to the artistic and historical achievements of other French people.

For present purposes, the important thing about culture is that it is a kind of social system. Just as a pack of wolves or a school of fish is a social system, so is France. But there are obvious differences. France is much more complex than a pack of wolves. It is rich in symbols, meanings, and information. There are more different kinds of relationships among the French people than among the wolves.

Culture and Human Social Life: SOCIAL ANIMAL OR CULTURAL ANIMAL?

Being social animals is not what is most special about human beings. What is special is being cultural animals. Some other animals have bits and scraps of culture.

Social psychologists like to use the phrase “the social animal” to describe human nature. Th is phrase has been used by many influential thinkers, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle right down to the modern social psychologist Elliot Aronson (2007). By calling people social animals, these thinkers are saying that people seek connections to others and prefer to live, work, and play together with other people.

People are indeed social animals, but using this label may miss the mark of what is special about human beings. Plenty of other animals are social, from ants to elephants (as Aronson and others acknowledge). Human beings are not the only and probably not even the most social animals.

Nature and Social Behavior: THE SOCIAL BRAIN

Trees don’t need brains, and solitary creatures can get by with relatively simple ones. Social animals, however, require brains with additional, flexible capabilities.

The evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1993, 1996) compared the brain sizes of many different species to see what behavioral differences went with bigger brains. (Brain size is always adjusted for body weight, because bigger animals generally have bigger brains. For example, human men have bigger brains than women, but that’s mainly because men are bigger all over.) Did big-brained species eat better foods, or more complicated foods such as fruit (which ripens and turns rotten rapidly)? Did they roam over larger territories, so that they needed a bigger brain to maintain a more complex mental map? No. What Dunbar found was that bigger brains were mainly linked to having larger and more complex social groups. Small-brained animals tend to live alone or in small, simple groups, whereas bigger-brained, presumably smarter animals have more relationships with each other and more complicated groups (such as those with dominance hierarchies and competing allies).

Th is conclusion is highly important. The human brain did not evolve because it helped us outsmart lions and tigers and bears, or build better shelters, or invent calculus. It evolved mainly in order to enable human beings to have rich, complex social lives. Th e brain is not for understanding the physical world around us, so much as it is for understanding each other. It is not so much a calculating brain or a problem-solving brain as it is a social brain.