Changing cultures, changing brains: A framework for integrating cultural neuroscience and cultural change research

Highlights

• Cultural Neuroscience and the study of Cultural Change are two novel approaches to understanding human cultural variation.

• Human cultures are dynamic, and yet our understanding of cultural neural variations may represent a snapshot.

• Insights from Cultural Change research can lead to novel predictions regarding cultural neural variations.

• Insights from Cultural Neuroscience may help explain how ecological cues are translated into downstream cultural outputs.

• Methods from each field may help inform the other. A broad vision for future integration of the two fields is proposed.

Abstract

Cultural neuroscience research has provided substantial evidence that culture shapes the brain by providing systematically different sets of experiences. However, cultures are ever-changing in response to the physical and social environment. In the present paper, we integrate theories and methods from cultural neuroscience with the emerging body of research on cultural change and suggest several ways in which the two fields can inform each other. First, we propose that the cultural change perspective helps us reexamine what is meant by culturally typical experiences, which are shaped by the dynamic interaction between cultural norms, values, meanings, and other environmental constraints on behavior. It also allows us to make predictions about the variability/stability of cultural neural differences over time. Then, we discuss how methods used in cultural change research may be applied to cultural neuroscience research and vice versa. We end with a “blue sky vision” for a neuroscience of cultural change.

Introduction

Our brains are shaped by experience. A fundamental premise of cultural neuroscience is that because different cultural contexts may provide systematically different suites of experiences, these contexts can lead to systematic differences in neural function and even structure across human groups (Chiao, 2009; Chiao and Immordino-Yang, 2013; Han et al., 2013; Kitayama & Uskul, 2011). Yet human cultures are dynamic; a fundamental premise of cultural change research is that changes in our physical and social environments lead to changes in our cultures (Varnum and Grossmann, 2017). Indeed, the emerging science of cultural change has demonstrated shifts in a wide range of phenomena, including individualism (Bianchi, 2016; Grossmann and Varnum, 2015; Santos et al., 2017), gender equality (Twenge et al., 2012; Varnum & Grossmann, 2016), prejudice (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019a; Charlesworth and Banaji, 2019b), preference for complexity (Jordan et al., 2019; Varnum, Krems, Morris, Wormley, & Grossmann, 2021), and the strength of social norms (Jackson, van Egmond et al., 2019; Jackson, Gelfand et al., 2019) in recent decades and centuries.

What are the implications of these and other shifts for findings and theory in cultural neuroscience? What new predictions might be generated by taking cultural change seriously? What new insights into cultural dynamics might be provided by using neuroscience methods? How can the effects of cultural change be studied at the level of the brain? In the present piece, we attempt to answer these questions and to layout a broad vision for how these two emerging approaches to studying culture may inform and enrich each other. These two research areas that differ dramatically in their scale and methods—a time scale of milliseconds vs. months up to centuries, the study of collections of neurons from dozens of individual brains vs. big and archival data from entire populations—may in fact have quite a bit to teach each other.