The Advantages of Culture
Many Nigerians from the Yoruba people blend a mix of red peppers together to make a versatile sauce that is often eaten with chicken, called Obe Ata.
Given the relative abundance of red peppers and many of the other ingredients used in Obe Ata, it is likely that at some point in history in West Africa whoever invented Obe Ata will have had a nutritional or economic advantage. That advantage passed to every West African who copied how Obe Ata was prepared, bought, and eaten.
As more people adopted the practice, it became part of the culture of that society.
Imitation also paid off as a display of group identity, beyond the command of resources.
Members of a society will bond over shared rituals such as religious practices, or the consumption or performance of music. No animal is capable of producing music with the complexity of humans.
The enjoyment of music is itself a strange thing: the organization of sequences of noises into enjoyable patterns that elicit emotional responses. I’m often struck by how many people in romantic partnerships will cite shared musical taste as an important component of what makes their partner attractive.
At large social gatherings like weddings or family celebrations, many will take great pleasure from their shared experience of listening and dancing to roughly the same playlist of music at each such event. For them that music defines them and their group.
This shared culture creates social bonds that make co-operation easier – sometimes against a common enemy – and can strengthen a group’s grip on resources.
Failing to keep common cultural practices can bring conflict and even ostracism. For example, when a child in a devout religious family starts to lose their religion. Or at a societal level, when there is a new schism in a religion such as the Protestant Reformation.
Over human history, then, there were also many non-material reasons for individuals to conform to their wider group.
Over time the material and communal advantages to be gained from conformity, and the dangers of ostracism, will have led to strong selection pressures for mimetic instincts in humans.
This instinct is so strong that it can be used to override other powerful natural impulses such as self-preservation. A famous example of this is the death of over 900 members of the People’s Temple cult led by Jim Jones in 1978. Many of them drank a cyanide-laced drink, largely because of group pressure, and a deep trust in their leader.
At a societal level, for nearly a thousand years, Chinese women bound their feet to achieve a small size that was considered beautiful and high-status. It caused intense pain, disability, and lifelong health issues. Foot binding was a marriage-and-status system: small feet were treated as a mark of eligibility, and families enforced the practice because a daughter’s marriage prospects depended on it.
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