The Role of Psychology in the Study of Culture

Stephen Stich Rutgers University Abstract: While we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways that appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. The target article makes three main claims. The first, a claim about culture itself, maintains that culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties. The second and third are about the study of culture. According to the second, research on culture can and should take a broadly Darwinian stance, which borrows many of the theoretical assumptions, analytic tools and experimental methods of evolutionary biology. The third claim is an account of a unifying framework within which that research should be organized : “the structure of a science of culture should broadly resemble the structure of evolutionary biology” (ms, pg. 2). Though we agree wholeheartedly with the first two claims, we find the third less convincing. For while the proposed account is useful, it is also importantly incomplete because it fails to clarify or sufficiently emphasize the central explanatory role that psychology is likely to play in the emerging science of culture. Research has already shown that a number of features of the species‐typical human psychological endowment influence cultural evolution along a variety of