Communication and culture: A complexity theory approach

In the target paper, Kashima (2014) harvests insights from communication research, shared reality theory in social psychology, diffusionism in cognitive anthropology and connectionism in cognitive psychology to propose a neodiffusionist account of culture. A major contribution of this account is that it offers a social psychological explanation of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. According to this account, cultural ideas and practices are those that are widespread within a designated human group; they are ‘generated (largely randomly), socially transmitted, and retained within a human population due to their adaptive advantage’ (p. 81).