Culture—the totality of traditions acquired in a community by social learning from other individuals—has increasingly been found to be pervasive not only in humans’ but in many other animals’ lives. Compared with learning on one’s own initiative, learning from others can be very much safer and more efficient, as the wisdom already accumulated by other individuals is assimilated. This article offers an overview of often surprising recent discoveries charting the reach of culture across an ever-expanding diversity of species, as well as an extensive variety of behavioral domains, and throughout an animal’s life. The psychological reach of culture is reflected in the knowledge and skills an animal thus acquires, via an array of different social learning processes. Social learning is often further guided by a suite of adaptive psychological biases, such as conformity and learning from optimal models. In humans, cumulative cultural change over generations has generated the complex cultural phenomena observed today. Animal cultures have been thought to lack this cumulative power, but recent findings suggest that elementary versions of cumulative culture may be important in animals’ lives.

人们越来越多地发现了文化，即通过社交学习从其他个体中在社区中获得的全部传统，这种文化不仅在人类而且在许多其他动物的生活中也普遍存在。与主动学习相比，向他人学习可以更加安全和有效，因为其他人已经积累了智慧。本文概述了最近常常令人惊讶的发现，这些发现描绘了动物在不断扩展的物种多样性，广泛的行为范围以及整个动物生命中的影响范围。通过一系列不同的社会学习过程，动物获得的知识和技能反映出文化的心理影响。社交学习通常会受到一系列适应性心理偏见的进一步指导，例如一致性和从最佳模型中学习。在人类中，历代累积的文化变化已产生了当今观察到的复杂文化现象。人们认为动物文化缺乏这种累积能力，但是最近的发现表明累积文化的基本形式可能对动物的生活很重要。