Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Cristine Legare for the"Stories of Impact" series.

Watch the video version of this interview.

RS = Richard Sergay (interviewer)

CL = Cristine Legare (interviewee)

Cristine Legare is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

RS: Please tell us about the research project you’re conducting. What is the genesis of the project, and why is Templeton World Charity Foundation interested?

CL: Templeton World Charity Foundation is funding a research project that we’re conducting, most broadly on cognitive evolution. The objective of the research that we’re doing is to try to understand both from a developmental perspective as well as from an evolutionary perspective, the building blocks of culture and cultural learning. Ultimately we want to try to understand why it is that our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, has roughly the same technological repertoire that they’ve had for thousands of years, and human children are using iPhones at this point. We want to understand the kind of cognitive infrastructure that underlies cultural complexity, as well as innovation, tool innovation, technological innovation, differences between the species and how that develops over time. 

The project is based on my interest in human uniqueness, which is an interest that the Templeton Foundation, the Temple World Charity Foundation in particular, shares. So this project provides insight into what makes humans unique cognitively, culturally, and socially. 

 

RS: What is cognitive evolution?

CL: Cognitive evolution is the process by which the psychological system underlying learning and communication changes over the course of evolutionary history. It concerns differences between the cognitive systems of different species — different species that vary in how closely related they are to each other. The way I study cognitive evolution is really an attempt to understand how intelligent activity has evolved, both within and between species. Between species comparison gives unique insight into how cognitive systems — that can be quite different or quite similar — are capable of really different endpoints.

 

RS: What is intelligent activity?

CL: To me that’s intentional, goal-directed behavior. That’s what I think of as an intelligent activity. It’s mindful, it’s intentional, it is directed towards achieving a particular result. 

 

RS: How has cognition evolved?

CL: In our species, cognition has evolved in the context of group living, group interaction. All of the cognitive activities of humans generally, and human children in particular, exist in a social context. The content of our thoughts are shaped by our interactions with other people, not just our direct interactions, but our interactions with the products of people, which are cultural artifacts, technologies, bodies of knowledge, everything we think about is the product of either direct or indirect interaction with other humans or their products. This is in many ways quite different from our closest relatives, who don’t have bodies of accumulated cultural knowledge stored in books and computers and oral traditions, for example. So although all other primates interact quite extensively with members of their own species, the unique feature of human culture is the accumulation of this kind of cultural knowledge.

 

RS: What do you attribute that difference to?

CL: I think there are a number of explanations for that. I mean there are multiple differences that can explain technological complexity between say chimpanzees, for example, and humans. One explanation is surely neurological and cognitive. We have different cognitive systems. They’re, they’re similar at their most basic, but there are surely neurological explanations for that difference. But, there are many other explanations for this. One — and this is one of the things I’ve studied quite extensively — is the kind of human obsession with the beliefs and thoughts and knowledge of other humans. We are deeply interested in what other humans know, we’re interested in acquiring that knowledge ourselves, through imitation, through observation, through teaching, and even at the very youngest ages. Young children are interested in acquiring the knowledge of others. It’s our preoccupation with others and what they know through social learning that can explain this really massive difference in content knowledge.

Not only that, but at this point in our history, we have these massive stores of cultural knowledge that we can access. For example, there isn’t any one person who could construct an iPhone from top to bottom. This knowledge is distributed over many brains. There are many kinds of cultural reservoirs of knowledge. And the way that we interact with others is also part of this.

 

RS: Tell us more about the research’s focus on children.

CL: Children learn culture in a variety of different ways. In fact, what children have is a repertoire of cultural learning strategies. For example, children learn through observation, by watching others in their environment. They learn through participation. By following along in the activities of others, they learn through imitation, which is reproducing the behavior of others around them. They also learn through instruction. They learn, because other people in their environment, such as their parents, their teachers, teach them. They have a whole repertoire of processes that they use to learn culture. Some of those processes are better for learning some types of skills than others. So they have a very flexible and powerful toolkit of learning strategies at their disposal.

 

RS: Is this unique to humans?

CL: Many other animals have the capacity to learn using some of those learning strategies. For example, observation. We’re certainly not the only animal that learns by observing. But we are the only animal probably that learns through teaching. There’s differences not just in amount, but also in kind. I think it's the constellation of those learning strategies and the reliance on those, and the flexibility with which we can deploy them, that makes us unique, and makes us incredibly powerful social learners. 

 

RS: What is culture?

CL: Culture is a suite of knowledge systems, technologies, toolkits that are transmitted both within and between generations. These systems of knowledge are transmitted within populations, and we transmit them across generations. It’s a big part of how children learn. The systems also change over time. Culture is not static, it’s a moving target. It changes, it increases in complexity. It can decrease in complexity over time. Culture is these systems of knowing.

 

RS: How does culture change over time?

CL: So if we think about technology, for example, in just my own lifetime, I can think of at least five different substantially different technologies that I’ve used to store information, to store data that I’ve collected in my laboratory. The pace at which our technology is changing for how we store information in computers, or in data storage systems, changes, and has changed incredibly rapidly. The size of our storage and the speed at which we can process it, and apply it to new tasks, are changing incredibly rapidly. So in some domains of our technology, the speed of change and complexity and efficiency is really quite extraordinary. 

 

RS: Are technologies changing children’s brains?

CL: I wouldn’t say technologies are changing the hardware of children’s brains, but they’re certainly changing what children are learning, and the ways in which they’re interacting with others. Things like digital screens change the dynamic. They provide us with some information, they don’t provide us with other kinds of information. So it changes the dynamic of the social interaction. It can also change the conclusions that we draw from the interaction. And it both increases and decreases the amount of control that we have over the information that we’re receiving from other people.

 

RS: How do children become members of the community?

CL: Basically, what my studies show is that from birth, young children are working to learn how to become members of whatever community that they’re born into. They’re working on learning the languages of the community that they’re part of, by listening in, by imitating the speech of those around them. And it’s not just that children are putting in the work to learn information. They are of course doing that. All of the people in their community — from their parents, to their siblings, their extended families, and their teachers — are putting effort into teaching them, and to providing information that is really, is kind of optimally structured for them to learn it. That’s a big part of what makes human culture exceptional. It’s not just that our children are motivated to learn. We’re also motivated to spend a lot of time and energy teaching them. This is very different from what we’ve seen in any other animal species. So, a capuchin monkey might be tolerant of another juvenile in their environment, watching them use this stone tool to crack nuts. But they’re not going to sit there and model the particular orientation that tool should be in for that juvenile. Where humans do that all the time, and not just for their own children, but for unrelated children. We’ve set up cultural transmission systems, which we call schools, that are specifically designed to transmit culture to unrelated children. So it's a complex system that is specifically designed to transmit cultural knowledge. And it works really on both ends.

 

RS: Both ends of?

CL: Both ends in that children are motivated to learn and we are motivated to teach them. 

Cultural learning is possible because children are deeply interested in learning information from others. They spend a lot of their time doing that. But we also have cultural transmission systems such as schools, that are specifically designed to teach children that information. So you have really a kind of a perfect system of motivated to learn and motivated to teach.

 

RS: In imparting culture through a school system, who defines what that culture is?

CL: There are many people that decide what cultural knowledge is going to be transmitted within a school system. This is everything from the local values of the community, the skills and content knowledge that that particular population, what they value, what will be useful to children as they grow into adulthood, and you need to acquire particular kinds of systems of knowledge and, and toolkits. These are decisions that are determined by a complex hierarchy of, of influencers, educational influencers, everything from parents to school board members. 

 

RS: Do these learning touch points change over time?

CL: They do change over time. Often, the systems that we put in place, whether they’re elementary schools, high schools, universities, have often lagged behind the speed of technological progress. And this is one constant source of tension that we need cultural transmission systems to be as flexible as the pace of technological change. And often, large administrative systems are not as nimble as we might want them to be, which is one of the reasons why educational reform is such a popular topic. We need our educational systems to be responsive to the changes in our economy and our technologies that are changing at just a breakneck speed currently. 

 

RS: There can be a common set of cultural learning skills that every child gets?

CL: I think the goal of educating children, the goal of child rearing, is to equip them with the skills and the knowledge they need to be successful as an adult in the community that they live in. So ideally, schools should be preparing children to be successful adults in the communities they anticipate living in. One of the current challenges is that with globalization, and really extraordinary levels of mobility, adults can live in any corner of the world, not just the country but any corner of the globe. So a big challenge to educational systems is to prepare children to be global citizens, to have a repertoire of, of learning capacities, that will allow them to adapt to really diverse environments, that they might live in in the future. I mean, it’s increasingly common not to know what city you’ll live in when you’re 20 or 25 or 30. And for many people those are not the same city. It’s common for people to live in multiple different cities and multiple different countries. So it’s a challenge to our educational system to prepare people to be that flexible, and to be lifelong learners. 

 

RS: How do children acquire cultural practices and skill sets?

CL: That occurs by interacting with family members, so they learn distinct skills from their immediate family and their extended family — things like the values, character traits, they learn bodies of knowledge from the schools that they attend, from the peers that they interact with. So all of the different types of people that the children engage in, teach them different, different skills, different kinds of knowledge. They also learn through active exploration and kind of firsthand experimentation in the world around them. So they’re learning using a variety of different learning processes, imitation, exploration, observation, but they’re also being taught by peers, by teachers, by their parents. And each of these kinds of teaching imparts different kinds of knowledge. 

 

RS: Define cumulative culture.

CL: Cumulative culture is a process by which a population's stock of knowledge and skills are transmitted within and between populations, and changes over time. Culture accumulates over time. The more human brains that contribute to a body of knowledge, the more it changes and the more complex it gets. We transmit this to our children and to others in our environment.

 

RS: Does that change over time?

CL: Well, certainly we’ve seen it with human culture, especially in the past several thousand years. The amount of cultural knowledge that we have accumulated and are transmitting and generating is truly vast. One of the reasons that we have developed computer technology is simply to store the truly tremendous amount of information that our populations are developing. All of these cultural transmission systems we’ve developed over thousands of years — literacy and numeracy, and more recently computer technology — allow us to store, to transmit, but also to build upon the insights of previous generations. The reason we have an iPhone now is that we’ve been able to accumulate the many, many, many, insights in previous generations that have led up to the current technology — that isn’t the product of one generation. That’s the product of many, many iterations of the technology that forms the basis for the iPhone. Many brains and many minds are contributing to this technology, a vast network that spans hundreds, even thousands of years. 

 

RS: You use the example of a 13 year old boy from Sierra Leone without a formal education or training in batteries or engineering. How do you explain that?

CL: I think that particular example of technological innovation reveals what is most special about human cognition and human intelligence. That example shows a young boy who was motivated to come up with a solution, not just for himself but for others. A big reason that we innovate and create new technologies is because they are useful for the communities that we are part of. The reason he was able to do that, is he was able to take bits of technology that had been developed by other people, people in faraway places, and combine those bits of technologies in novel ways, to solve the current problem at hand, which was used to generate electricity. So a big part of innovation is not just developing something entirely new, but combining novel insights in new ways. It’s putting pieces together in ways that have never been combined before. 

 

RS: Describe innovation.

CL: Innovation is a complex process that has at least three prongs to it. The first part of innovation is coming up with something different, something novel. The next part of innovation is coming up with something that is useful and better than what came before.. One can certainly generate novel ideas that are not specifically very useful and are not better. So it needs to be new, and it needs to be better. And then just as importantly, it needs to be adopted by others, so it needs to be taken on and recognized by groups and populations as something that’s useful and something that they want to use within their own communities. One of the reasons that innovation or technological innovation — true technological innovations — are rare, is that they’re tremendously complicated.. It’s new, it’s better, and it’s adopted by others. And this process is typically the product of large numbers of people. Innovation can occur at the level of an individual, but it most often involves vast communities of people working together, to generate new and better ideas.

 

RS: What are some good examples of this?

CL: Examples of technological innovation at the level of the individual or at the level of the population?

 

RS: Population.

CL: There’s enormous advances within biomedicine, in terms of the search for a vaccine for the coronavirus. This is an example of really watching biomedical innovation in action. So vaccine development is the process of building upon technologies that have been developed in the past, but deploying them and applying them to viruses that are still in the process of discovery. Figuring out the kind of biology of these microorganisms and deploying a wide range of different potential solutions, as fast a pace as possible, until you settle on one that’s  effective is a process that involves the collective intelligence of large numbers of people. Vaccines aren’t developed by one person. It wouldn’t be possible for that to happen.

 

RS: Is the iPhone also an example of this?

CL: Oh, absolutely. One of the things that you often see in American culture is that we valorize, kind of solitary geniuses. And this in fact misrepresents the process of scientific discovery. All major discoveries are the process of the synthesis and accumulation and recombination of the insights of many, many people working together. If you actually wanted to give a list giving full credit for the iPhone, there would be hundreds or thousands of names on that list. Steve Jobs is just the figurehead of a cultural product of thousands of people in many, many countries around the world. 

 

RS: Link innovation to cumulative culture.

CL: Innovation and cumulative culture are deeply interconnected. One of the things I’ve written about is imitation and innovation as the dual engines of cultural learning. Accumulative culture requires mechanisms of transmission — things that are moving that cultural knowledge forward, transmitting it within populations, and then across generations. It’s like imitation is an integral part of that. But you also need novelty. You need new solutions. You need better solutions. And that’s where innovation comes in. Innovation allows you to build upon the insights of previous generations, but also to add to them, to modify them, to meet current demands, to solve critical problems. So you really need both of those processes to get more complex, more diverse, more  useful repertoires of cultural knowledge.

 

RS: Have you seen exponential growth in cumulative culture and learning as the Internet has exploded?

CL: The role of the Internet and how it relates to cumulative culture, I think is really a fascinating topic, for the following reasons. The Internet I think has profound consequences for what cumulative culture looks like now and what it will look like in the future, for the following reasons.

The Internet allows you to access information at a very rapid rate. And that means that you can in many ways outsource a lot of knowledge. So it’s no longer necessary to memorize certain bodies of knowledge, because you can easily type a few words into Google, and immediately have access to that information. It gives us access to much more, much larger bodies of knowledge, that are very, very widely distributed, and are not contained in the actual brain of individuals. So it’s an incredibly powerful tool, but it does mean that we outsource a lot of the information that maybe in the past we were required to, to memorize. And in even toolkits that we now no longer have, because we know we can look them up. We know we can access that information online. So it gives us access to a broader range of information than we’ve ever had access to before. But we also outsource in ways that we never have previously. It has implications for things like navigation. Relying on navigational software often means we attend less to our immediate environment. And there’s similar parallels in all kinds of different skill sets and  toolkits. But it’s instrumental to how we will proceed going forward. It also means that we have  on demand access to information that we could never personally memorize. So it gives us breadth but it also changes how we process information.

 

RS: When’s the last time you remembered a phone number, right? What are the implications for culture when technology is encroaching ever so more on humans?

CL: I think that there are, there are compromises between depth and breadth. So the Internet gives access to an enormous breadth of information, but it also means that our firsthand experience with particular toolkits, systems of knowledge, and even with particular people, is more limited. So that kind of firsthand lived experience is something that we are, we’re getting less of. And you can see this in, in the formal schooling environments that children experience. I’ll often have university students in my classes, worried that they don’t, they don’t have skills, that they don’t have concrete skills that they can name and recognize. Of course they do have those skills, they just don’t have the words necessarily to describe them. And a lot of what they’re learning isn’t through firsthand experience.It’s through books, it’s through the Internet, it’s through learning in de-contextualized environments. And that’s one of the consequences of learning through the Internet. That firsthand experience, which for some skills is really critical. If you’ve ever tried to fish, to go fishing by learning from all of your previous experiences, or by watching YouTube videos, that actual experience of fishing is a challenge, right? There isn’t really any replacement for firsthand experience for a lot of important skills and knowledge. We still need that component and the Internet simply can’t provide that for us. At least not exclusively. 

 

RS: What is AI and machine learning’s impact on culture, both positive and negative?

CL: I think artificial intelligence has both very positive and probably negative implications for human culture. Positive implications are that we can process information digitally at much more rapid rates with much higher levels of accuracy than we ever have before. Artificial intelligence has transformed many of our industries, our medical industries, our technical and technological industries. In many respects artificial intelligence is vastly superior to speed of processing. There’s also a lot of problems that the human mind appears to be truly unique in its capacity to solve. So we don’t have AI solutions for a lot of the tasks that humans are uniquely good at. Innovation would be one tremendous example of that. Our ability to synthesize information in novel ways, come up with new ideas, is unparalleled and is not matched by AI technology. So using it to supplement our intelligence I think is the path forward. Not to replace it. I think there is no replacement for human intelligence.

 

RS: Do you worry about human culture being impacted negatively by the encroachment of technology or does it enhance it?

CL: I think that all cultural technologies transform human cognition. They’re the product of human intelligence and the Internet certainly transforms how we interact, how we think, how we solve problems, but so does literacy, so does numeracy. So does every cultural technology we’ve ever developed. There’s tremendous evidence that learning to read transforms the brain, transforms how we process information and, and what we attend to. The Internet, the global kind of technological revolution that we’re in the middle of, is absolutely transforming our cognition. And every, every new technology has pros and cons associated with it. But I don’t have any particular worries about this technology. I think it’s best to be open-minded in thinking through how best to deploy it and, and also how to avoid potentially negative repercussions. 

 

RS: Are there unanticipated consequences? Are there any losses?

CL: Human history is a long, long line of culture being created and culture being lost. So many languages that have ever been spoken have been lost over the course of human history. Most of the technologies that humans have developed, or many of them, have also been lost. So human culture is never static. And creating new systems of knowledge, displaces others. And there is loss and there is tragedy associated with that. I mean currently at this point in human history we’re seeing the loss of tremendous linguistic diversity and cultural diversity. We’re also seeing access to information in ways that have never before been possible, and connections between groups of humans that have never been possible in the past. Opportunities for an incredibly diverse array of different cultural communities and populations to have access to technology, to global decision-making, were never possible in the past. We are more interconnected. We communicate more than ever before, which I think is tremendously positive. But there's always loss associated with gain. It always has been. 

 

RS: The Internet is a global village. Is it a global cultural village too?

CL: Absolutely. You can go to Lusaka Zambia and, and find businesses, corporations, schools, that resemble cultures that are, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away. So there’s been tremendous exchange in, in language, in cultural technology, in values and belief systems. There’s absolutely a global culture that is not necessarily democratic always. So there are lots of concerns I think about certain cultural groups dominating that conversation, and excluding others, be it the dominance of the English language for example in global commerce and communication. So going forward, that global culture should ideally represent the tremendous, dazzling diversity of human culture, rather than a kind of hegemony of one or two dominant groups. Figuring out how to create a more democratic and inclusive global culture, I think should be a top priority. We’re stronger with diversity. I mean that’s a big part of what drives innovation. The more ideas you have, the better ultimately your solutions will be. Why not include the best ideas from every corner of the globe, rather than just consider a small spectrum of the human population and their voices and beliefs. 

 

RS: Do you see that happening?

CL: I do see that happening. I think that a lot of the growing pains associated with modern democracies are bringing to the forefront a lot of the tensions of figuring out how to create a global citizen — what that citizen should look like, what kind of knowledge they should have, what sorts of values that they should have. We’re not there yet. And while we certainly haven’t arrived, never before in the history of the planet have we ever even had that conversation about what a global citizen would be. I think that it’s exciting times. And I don’t worry at all that we haven’t arrived at exactly the process for determining that, the fact that we’re even having these conversations I think is, is a step in the right direction. 

 

RS: What would a global citizen be?

CL: We’re at a point in human history for the very first time that the topic of what a global citizen is and the skill sets that they should have, the values, the characteristics they should have, is an increasingly global conversation. The idea of a global citizen has never been a possibility before. Humans evolved in the context of small group living. A lot of our psychology is oriented towards living in relatively small groups. And now our cultural communities are hundreds in some cases, hundreds of millions, of other people. We’re at a point in human history where we’re creating global culture. And going forward, this process of defining a global citizen should be more inclusive. It should include and pull from the tremendous strength of cultural diversity. The fact that human culture is more diverse than culture in any other animal species by far, is our greatest strength. We’re pulling from a vast repertoire of technological tool kits, systems of knowledge, languages, and diversity of thought. The more we have to pull from, the better our solutions will be, and the better our outcomes will be. 

 

RS: Describe comparative work with other species.

CL: The recent comparisons between humans and closely related primate species, like chimpanzees for example, are informative because genetically, we are tremendously similar. Cognitively, we’re also quite similar. And yet, our cognition, our culture, our ways of life, our technological toolkits, are tremendously different. So how do you explain this diversity when our biology certainly is not the same, but it’s not that different? One of the things we’re finding in research over the course of the past couple decades is that we’ve underestimated the intelligence and the kind of cultural capacities of our closest living relatives. You know, we used to think humans were unique in our ability to use tools. We were clearly wrong about that. Many animal species use tools. But they don’t use tools that are as complex as ours. They certainly don’t use iPhones. So there is a difference certainly in complexity and prevalence, and a big part of what comparisons between species tell us is where those differences come from. What does knowledge of those differences tell us about the different endpoints in terms of cultural complexity between species? Are these cognitive differences? Are these information processing differences? Are they social learning differences, for example? And that’s a big part of what my research program is exploring.

 

RS: At a high level, what are we learning?

CL: We’re learning that social learning, in particular a kind of cultural learning, is absolutely critical to explaining differences between species in cultural complexity. So it's not just that we learn from others, it’s that we are motivated to become like others. We’re motivated to know what they know, to act in the way that they act. You know, basically as early as you can study children’s imitation, children are imitating everything their caretakers are doing, their siblings are doing. Other members of their community are doing. And the careful and close attention to the knowledge and toolkits and beliefs and values of others around you — over time there’s a ratcheting effect and the amount that the juvenile species or juvenile humans have —  is truly tremendous. So many, many years of careful attention and learning from others around us, creates vast repertoires of knowledge. And then of course the cultural transmission systems we have in place — the educational systems, literacy, numeracy, information technology, provide ever more complex bodies of knowledge for young people to learn from. 

 

RS: Do we see that in primates?

CL: Certainly, non-human primates learn by observing others. We don’t see evidence of the kind of teaching that humans engage in with their offspring. So there are critical differences in social learning, between chimpanzees for example, and humans. 

 

RS: What is a specific example of this?

CL: One critical example is teaching. Human parents spend an enormous amount of time teaching their children, modifying particular activities to be maximally comprehensible to a young child. And they’ll include their young children in ongoing activities they’re engaging in, despite the fact that they basically just get in the way and slow down the activity. But we tolerate that because one of our primary goals is to educate our offspring. Our non-human primates might even tolerate juveniles in their environment, observing them, but they’re never going to take time out of their activities to do anything that I think truly resembles teaching.  In humans, that’s one core difference.

 

RS: What makes us exceptional?

CL: We’re exceptional in many respects. Our drive to learn is unmatched by any other species. So we’re characteristically curious. We learn not just because we have a particular problem to solve, although that of course does drive our curiosity. We’re interested in discovery. We’re surprised by inconsistency. We have a tremendous appetite for understanding more, for learning more, for innovating, for developing better ways of doing things. That is just uncharacteristic of any other animal species. We are learners and we’re deeply interested in understanding why things work, and why people act the way that they do. We’re curious about not just our physical environment but also our social environment. 

 

RS: How has child rearing changed?

CL: Child rearing has changed in a great variety of different ways, even in the past ten years. We are raising our children in environments that are evolutionarily novel, to say the least. For example, in a city like Austin, Texas, it wouldn’t be uncommon to not have more than one or two children, right? So the number of children that we have, has decreased on average, for a great variety of interesting and complex reasons. We have smaller families. We’re also outsourcing childcare in ways that have been really unprecedented. It's not at all uncommon to have your young child in the care of people who are not your biological relatives. And to spend most of, most of their day around unrelated children, of whom, all happen to be pretty much the same age. So we’re raising our children in environments that have been constructed to maximize the efficiency of cultural transmission. We’re expecting our young children to learn very large bodies of knowledge in very short periods of time. Formal schools are pretty efficient at doing that. So we have the child rearing environment tremendously different than it has been in the past because our culture is tremendously different than it’s been in the past.

 

RS: Would you sum that up?

CL: Children use a repertoire of cultural learning strategies to learn knowledge and toolkits. So for example, they engage in observation, they watch others in their environment to learn what they do. They engage in exploration, they explore and experiment with the objects and artifacts in the world around them. They also directly participate in activities with others, and learn through direct participation. Adults are very tolerant of children doing that. Children also imitate the behavior of others around them. They are deeply motivated to do this in order to, not just learn what they know, but also to become like those around them. And they also, they learn through instruction. So a big part of what children know, they’ve been taught by others in their environment, whether it’s a teacher, it’s a parent, it’s a peer. Children are uniquely skilled at learning, and at learning through instruction, so they use this suite of learning capacities very flexibly to learn a great variety of different systems of knowledge and tools.

 

RS: Do we see this in other species?

CL: Many species use some of these learning strategies. For example, many animals learn by watching, observing others around them. There’s a lot of debate about whether other animals imitate. I think they don’t imitate the way that human children imitate. It’s really the constellation of these learning repertoires that makes cultural learning in humans unique. And all human children have these capacities. 

 

RS: What does cumulative culture and cumulative learning look like?

CL: Cumulative culture is, and will increasingly be, transformed by technology. So we are increasingly interconnected in the knowledge that we have access to, I think the world will be more and more interconnected.

The next ten years are going to require collective action to solve pressing problems that face all of us. We are increasingly interconnected, and we are also increasingly required to work together to tackle problems, including everything from climate change to pandemics. The construction of a global human citizen is a work in progress, and will require increasing inclusively, tolerance for diversity, and tolerance for working together, to harness the very best of human culture, and to innovate. We need human cultural complexity and innovation to solve pressing problems. And we need the best of human collective intelligence in order to succeed in this enterprise. 

 

RS: There seems to be something of a populist uprising in a variety of Western countries to move toward isolating rather than integrating societies?

CL: I think creating a global citizen requires pulling from the knowledge systems and toolkits of a great variety of different populations. This is something that humans have never had to grapple with in the past. And there are growing pains associated with constructing identities around, at the species level, rather than the country level or the state level, or even the village level. So this is a process of creating new identities that we’ve never had to construct before. Another thing to keep in mind is that we need to create a sustainable human condition, that provides the basic needs, basic rights, basic standard of living, that all humans deserve. So providing those basic needs, providing access to the kinds of resources and opportunities that currently only a small portion of our human population has access to, all of those things are necessary to succeed at a kind of a fair and inclusive global culture for all people.

 

RS: Are you an optimist?

CL: I’m absolutely optimistic. What is the alternative to that? We’re facing a lot of problems, but humans are creative enough, and resilient enough to develop solutions. We need to do things differently than we’ve done before. We are at an unprecedented point in human history and we need the very best of all human cultural insights and belief systems and systems of knowledge in order to tackle these problems. The only path forward is to work together and to do things better than we’ve done in the past. A lot of our old ways of knowing and proceeding are ineffective, and I think there’s collective recognition of that. Human history goes in one direction and we need to come up with new and innovative ways of being, and being together, to solve collective problems, to solve global problems and come up with effective solutions. 

 

RS: Talk about cooperation in culture.

CL: Human culture is possible only because of cooperation. I mean there are a lot of challenges associated with cooperation. The good news is that we’re tremendously good at cooperating, even very young children are motivated to cooperate. They’re pro-social. They’re interested in facilitating and helping others. So we harness this core feature of humans, and scale it. The challenge is: how do we harness our tendency to cooperate at scale, at a scale that is really unprecedented in human history? We have the capacity to do this, even really young children have the capacity to do this. So how do we scale it and how do we harness this and kind of build this at a global scale, at a scale that will benefit all human populations and not just a portion of them?

 

RS: So, how do you account for the incredible dark side of humanity?

CL: We are a pragmatic species and we evolved in the context of small group living and we also evolved in the context of competition between groups. So a lot of our biases to be altruistic, to be pro-social, to be generous, and to cooperate, extend to our in-group. And that is where we spend a lot of our positive energy, benefiting the small group of people around us. A big challenge that we have to tackle going forward is extending the in-group to include everyone, and not just those who are ethnically similar, racially similar, religiously similar, linguistically similar — that are similar at the level of our core biology, or members of a species — and not just our own species. The fact that we’ve prioritized our own species over other species, has led us astray in terms of the health of the planet, and preservation of biodiversity. So harnessing the best of our nature in order to inhibit the worst of our nature is critical.