Cultural Incentive Learning: How Culture Shapes Acquisition of Values

Abstract

Although research on human values is abundant, it has so far neglected a crucial question: what are the psychological mechanisms whereby culture shapes people's values? To address this, the manuscript introduces a framework examining how culture shapes the acquisition of values, a process referred to as cultural incentive learning. The proposal is that cultural incentive learning mediates the influence exerted by the structure of society upon people's values. According to the framework, when the social structure changes, certain forms of learning (i.e., conditioned reinforcement) are elicited which promote value change. Simultaneously, other forms of learning, which are based on imitating other people's behavior, pull toward the preservation of previous values, ensuring that value change is not too precipitous and that group cooperation is maintained. Applying these principles to cultural evolution, the paper develops a theory of how values evolve over history, a process we label Value Evolution.