How Culture Evolves Over Time
Every living society operates within a cultural framework that shapes how people think, behave, interact, and assign meaning to the world around them. But culture is never static. The norms that governed social behavior in Victorian England bear little resemblance to those governing London in the 2020s. The business practices of Japanese corporations in the 1980s look dramatically different from those emerging in Tokyo's startup scene today. The attitudes toward marriage, work, authority, and personal expression that your grandparents held as self-evident truths may feel foreign or even incomprehensible to you. Culture evolves, sometimes gradually and imperceptibly, sometimes in rapid bursts that transform entire civilizations within a single generation.
Understanding how culture evolves is not merely an academic exercise. For business leaders, it determines whether products, messaging, and organizational practices will resonate or fall flat. For policymakers, it reveals why some reforms succeed while others meet fierce resistance. For individuals navigating an increasingly interconnected world, it provides a framework for making sense of the dizzying pace of social change and understanding why different groups hold such different values and beliefs. Cultural evolution operates through mechanisms that are surprisingly systematic and, once understood, remarkably predictable in their broad patterns even if specific outcomes remain uncertain.
This examination traces the full machinery of cultural evolution, from the fundamental mechanisms of transmission and variation to the forces that accelerate or retard change, the role of technology and contact between societies, and the complex dynamics by which subcultures emerge, compete, and sometimes overtake the mainstream.
The Foundations of Cultural Evolution: Transmission, Variation, and Selection
Cultural evolution operates through three fundamental mechanisms that parallel, in important ways, the mechanisms driving biological evolution. These are cultural transmission, cultural variation, and cultural selection. Each mechanism functions differently from its biological counterpart, but the overall dynamic produces a similar result: populations change over time as some traits spread and others disappear.
Cultural Transmission: How Culture Passes Between People
Cultural transmission is the process by which practices, beliefs, values, knowledge, and behavioral patterns pass from one individual or group to another. Unlike genetic transmission, which follows rigid parent-to-offspring pathways, cultural transmission can occur through multiple channels and in multiple directions.
Vertical transmission flows from parents to children. This is the channel most similar to genetic inheritance. Parents teach their children language, religious beliefs, dietary habits, attitudes toward authority, and thousands of other cultural elements through direct instruction and modeling. Research by developmental psychologists like Annette Lareau has shown that parenting styles themselves are culturally transmitted, with middle-class parents in the United States tending to practice "concerted cultivation" (scheduling activities, encouraging negotiation with authority) while working-class parents more often practice "natural growth" (allowing unstructured play, expecting deference to authority). These different approaches then shape the next generation's cultural orientations in profound ways.
The fidelity of vertical transmission varies enormously. Some elements, like language and core religious identity, transmit with high fidelity across generations. A child raised in a Mandarin-speaking household will almost certainly speak Mandarin. Other elements transmit with much lower fidelity. Political attitudes, for example, show only moderate parent-child correlation, with studies finding correlations around 0.3 to 0.5 for political party identification and much weaker correlations for specific policy positions.
Horizontal transmission occurs between peers within the same generation. This channel becomes increasingly important as children age and peer influence grows. Fashion trends, slang, musical preferences, and workplace norms all spread primarily through horizontal transmission. The power of horizontal transmission explains why immigrant children often adopt the cultural practices of their peer group rather than those of their parents, a phenomenon that sociologist Alejandro Portes documented extensively in his studies of second-generation immigrants in Miami and San Diego.
Oblique transmission flows from non-parental adults to younger individuals. Teachers, religious leaders, media figures, coaches, mentors, and other influential adults all serve as cultural transmitters. This channel is particularly important in complex societies where specialized knowledge requires instruction from experts rather than parents. A child learning calculus acquires that knowledge from a teacher, not from parental modeling. The rise of mass media and, later, social media dramatically expanded the reach and power of oblique transmission, allowing single individuals to transmit cultural content to millions simultaneously.
Reverse transmission, sometimes called "cultural upstreaming," occurs when younger generations transmit cultural practices to older ones. This has become increasingly common in the digital age, where children often teach parents how to use technology, and where youth-driven cultural trends in music, fashion, and social media rapidly influence older demographics. Anthropologist Margaret Mead identified this pattern in the 1970s, calling it "prefigurative culture," where elders learn from youth rather than the reverse.
Cultural Variation: Where New Culture Comes From
For culture to evolve, there must be variation, meaning different cultural traits competing for adoption. Variation enters the cultural pool through several mechanisms.
Deliberate innovation occurs when individuals or groups intentionally create new practices, technologies, ideas, or institutions. Henry Ford did not merely build automobiles; he innovated the assembly line production method that transformed manufacturing culture worldwide. Steve Jobs did not merely create a phone; the iPhone catalyzed an entirely new culture of constant connectivity, app-based services, and mobile-first design thinking. Deliberate innovation is most common in societies that value novelty and reward creators, which is itself a cultural trait that varies across time and place.
Accidental variation arises from imperfect transmission. When cultural practices pass between individuals, small modifications inevitably creep in. A recipe passed through generations gradually changes as each cook makes slight adjustments. A business process documented in a manual gets interpreted slightly differently by each new employee who reads it. Religious rituals performed from memory drift over centuries. This is the cultural equivalent of genetic mutation, and like mutation, most accidental variations are neutral or harmful, but occasionally one proves advantageous and spreads.
Recombination creates new cultural elements by combining existing ones. Jazz music emerged from the recombination of African rhythmic traditions, European harmonic structures, blues tonality, and brass band instrumentation. California cuisine recombined French cooking techniques with Asian ingredients and Latin American flavors. Business model innovation often involves recombining elements from different industries, as when Uber recombined GPS technology, smartphone apps, and the taxi service model to create ride-sharing.
Cultural borrowing introduces variation through contact with other cultures. When the Japanese encountered Western business practices in the post-World War II era, they did not adopt them wholesale. Instead, they selectively borrowed elements like quality control methods (transforming W. Edwards Deming's statistical process control into the Toyota Production System) while retaining distinctly Japanese cultural elements like consensus decision-making (nemawashi) and lifetime employment. This selective borrowing created a hybrid business culture that proved remarkably successful.
Cultural Selection: Why Some Practices Spread and Others Die
Not all cultural variants survive. Cultural selection determines which practices, beliefs, and behaviors spread through a population and which fade away. Selection operates through several distinct mechanisms.
Biased transmission occurs when people preferentially adopt certain cultural traits over others. Psychologist Robert Boyd and anthropologist Peter Richerson identified several forms of bias. Prestige bias leads people to copy the practices of high-status individuals, explaining why celebrity endorsements work and why business practices from successful companies get widely imitated. Conformity bias leads people to adopt whatever the majority is doing, which stabilizes cultural norms but can also lock in suboptimal practices. Content bias makes certain types of information inherently easier to remember and transmit, such as emotionally arousing stories, concrete rather than abstract ideas, and information related to survival threats.
Functional selection occurs when cultural practices that actually improve outcomes for their practitioners spread because those practitioners thrive. Agricultural societies that developed effective crop rotation techniques expanded at the expense of those that depleted their soil. Companies that adopted lean manufacturing in the 1990s outcompeted those that clung to traditional mass production methods. This mechanism most closely resembles natural selection in biology.
Institutional selection operates through organizations, laws, and power structures that promote certain cultural practices and suppress others. When the Chinese government implemented simplified characters in the 1950s, it deliberately selected one form of writing over another. When the European Union requires certain business practices across member states, it institutionally selects particular cultural norms. Religious institutions have historically been among the most powerful agents of institutional selection, promoting specific moral codes, dietary restrictions, marriage practices, and worldviews.
What Drives Cultural Change: The Major Forces
Understanding the mechanisms of cultural evolution is necessary but not sufficient. We must also understand what drives cultural change, meaning what environmental, technological, and social forces create the conditions for new variations to emerge and spread. Five major forces stand out as particularly important.
Technology as a Cultural Catalyst
Technology is perhaps the single most powerful driver of cultural change in recorded history. The invention of the printing press in 1440 did not merely make books cheaper; it undermined the Catholic Church's monopoly on scriptural interpretation, enabled the Protestant Reformation, accelerated the Scientific Revolution, and democratized literacy across Europe. Each of these cultural transformations would have been unimaginable without the underlying technological change.
The pattern repeats throughout history. The contraceptive pill, approved by the FDA in 1960, did not merely prevent pregnancy; it catalyzed a revolution in gender roles, sexual norms, family structures, and women's workforce participation that transformed Western culture within a single generation. By 1970, nearly 80% of American married women aged 20-24 were using the pill, and the downstream cultural effects were massive: women's enrollment in professional graduate programs surged, average age at first marriage increased, and cultural attitudes toward women's roles shifted dramatically.
The internet and social media represent the most recent example of technology-driven cultural change. Before social media, cultural transmission was primarily local and mediated by gatekeepers like editors, producers, and publishers. Social media eliminated these gatekeepers, enabling direct horizontal transmission on a global scale. The cultural consequences have been profound: the rise of call-out culture, the fragmentation of shared cultural narratives, the acceleration of trend cycles, the democratization of cultural production, and the emergence of entirely new forms of cultural expression like memes, which function as units of cultural transmission that mutate and spread with unprecedented speed.
Environmental Pressures and Resource Shifts
Environmental changes force cultural adaptation. When the Sahara region began drying approximately 5,500 years ago, the pastoral cultures that had thrived there were forced to migrate, concentrate along the Nile River, and develop the agricultural and administrative practices that eventually produced Egyptian civilization. The cultural evolution was not optional; it was driven by environmental necessity.
Modern examples abound. Water scarcity in regions like the American Southwest is driving cultural changes in attitudes toward lawns, water usage, and development patterns. Climate change is beginning to force cultural adaptations in coastal communities regarding where and how people build, how they relate to the sea, and how they plan for the future. Economic environmental changes also drive cultural evolution: the deindustrialization of the American Midwest did not merely eliminate jobs; it transformed the cultural identity of entire communities, shifting values, political orientations, and social structures in ways that continue to reverberate decades later.
Contact Between Cultures
When previously isolated cultures come into contact, the result is almost always cultural change for both groups, though rarely symmetric change. The Columbian Exchange beginning in 1492 transformed cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans adopted potatoes, tomatoes, corn, tobacco, and chocolate from the Americas, each of which reshaped European agricultural practices, dietary cultures, and even social rituals (coffee houses and chocolate houses became centers of cultural and political life in 17th-century Europe). The Americas received wheat, horses, cattle, and unfortunately, diseases that devastated indigenous populations and their cultural systems.
In the modern era, globalization has intensified cultural contact to unprecedented levels. The result is not the simple "cultural homogenization" that critics often fear. Research by sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse and others has shown that cultural contact more often produces hybridization, where elements from different cultures combine into new forms. Japanese anime influenced American animation, which then influenced European graphic design, which then fed back into Japanese aesthetic traditions. Korean pop music borrowed from American R&B and hip-hop, recombined these elements with Korean musical and visual traditions, and then re-exported the hybrid product to global audiences, including back to the United States. The result is not homogeneity but a complex ecology of cultural forms that are simultaneously local and global.
Generational Replacement
Perhaps the most relentless driver of cultural change is simply the replacement of one generation by the next. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart spent decades documenting how generational replacement drives cultural value shifts. His research across more than 100 societies showed that people largely form their basic cultural values during their formative years (roughly ages 12-25) based on the conditions they experience, and these values then remain relatively stable throughout adulthood. As older cohorts die and younger cohorts with different formative experiences enter adulthood, the cultural center of gravity gradually shifts.
This mechanism explains why cultural change on value-laden issues often follows a predictable timeline. Attitudes toward interracial marriage in the United States shifted gradually from the 1960s onward, not primarily because individual older Americans changed their minds, but because each successive cohort entered adulthood with more accepting attitudes while older cohorts with less accepting attitudes gradually died. The same pattern is visible in attitudes toward same-sex marriage, environmental concern, religious participation, and many other cultural dimensions. Generational replacement is slow but virtually unstoppable, which is why cultural conservatives who win political battles often lose the cultural war over time.
Internal Contradictions and Tensions
Cultures contain internal contradictions that generate pressure for change. American culture in the 18th and 19th centuries simultaneously espoused universal human equality ("all men are created equal") and practiced racial slavery. This contradiction generated enormous cultural tension that ultimately erupted in civil war and continues to drive cultural evolution around race to this day. Similarly, many contemporary cultures simultaneously value individual freedom and community welfare, economic growth and environmental protection, traditional family structures and gender equality. These contradictions create ongoing pressure for cultural evolution as societies struggle to resolve or manage competing values.
Sociologist Daniel Bell identified a particularly important contradiction in modern capitalist societies: the culture of production (which values discipline, delayed gratification, hard work, and self-denial) exists in tension with the culture of consumption (which values pleasure, immediate gratification, self-expression, and indulgence). This contradiction, Bell argued, generates perpetual cultural instability as the economic system simultaneously demands disciplined workers and hedonistic consumers.
Why Cultural Change Is Often Slow
Given all these forces pushing toward cultural change, it might seem surprising that culture often changes slowly. But several powerful mechanisms work to stabilize existing cultural patterns and resist innovation.
Coordination Problems and Cultural Equilibria
Many cultural practices persist not because anyone particularly likes them but because changing them requires coordinated action that is difficult to achieve. The QWERTY keyboard layout is a classic example: most typists would benefit from a more efficient layout, but switching requires everyone to switch simultaneously, which never happens. The same logic applies to cultural norms around business hours, meeting formats, communication styles, and countless other practices. Everyone might agree that a different approach would be better, yet the existing practice persists because no one can change unilaterally without incurring costs.
Economist Peyton Young formalized this insight by showing that cultural norms function as Nash equilibria: stable states where no individual can benefit by changing their behavior alone. In such states, cultural change requires a coordinated shift by a critical mass of individuals simultaneously, which is inherently difficult and explains why many cultural practices persist long after their original rationale has disappeared.
Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion
Psychological research has consistently shown that humans exhibit status quo bias, a preference for existing states of affairs over alternatives, even when alternatives are objectively superior. This bias is amplified by loss aversion, the tendency to weigh potential losses from change more heavily than equivalent potential gains. Together, these psychological tendencies create a powerful drag on cultural change.
In organizational settings, status quo bias manifests as "we've always done it this way" thinking. In social settings, it manifests as discomfort with norm violations. In political settings, it manifests as resistance to policy changes that would redistribute benefits or alter familiar institutions. The psychological roots of cultural conservatism are deep and evolutionarily grounded: in ancestral environments, familiar practices had at least proven non-fatal, while novel practices carried unknown risks.
Vested Interests and Power Structures
Those who benefit most from existing cultural arrangements have strong incentives to resist change. Aristocratic elites resisted democratic cultural shifts. Male-dominated institutions resisted gender equality. Established industries resist cultural shifts that threaten their business models. This resistance is not merely passive; powerful groups actively invest resources in maintaining favorable cultural arrangements through media control, education systems, legal frameworks, and social pressure.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital illuminates this dynamic. Dominant groups accumulate cultural capital, meaning knowledge of and facility with the dominant culture's practices, tastes, and behavioral norms, which then provides them with social advantages. Changes to the cultural landscape threaten to devalue this capital, giving dominant groups a material stake in cultural preservation that goes beyond mere preference or nostalgia.
Institutional Inertia
Institutions, whether religious organizations, educational systems, legal frameworks, or bureaucracies, tend to codify and perpetuate existing cultural practices. Once a cultural norm is embedded in institutional policy, procedure, or infrastructure, changing it requires not just changing minds but changing systems. The QWERTY keyboard is built into every computer. Traditional academic calendar structures are built into school buildings, bus schedules, childcare arrangements, and employment contracts. Changing any single element requires changing an entire interconnected system, which dramatically increases the cost of cultural change.
| Factor Slowing Cultural Change | Mechanism | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Coordination problems | Individual change is costly without collective change | Metric system adoption in the US |
| Status quo bias | Psychological preference for familiar patterns | Resistance to remote work pre-pandemic |
| Vested interests | Powerful groups benefit from current arrangements | Fossil fuel industry opposing green culture |
| Institutional inertia | Systems codify and reinforce existing practices | Education systems maintaining industrial-age schedules |
| Transmission fidelity | Accurate parent-to-child cultural reproduction | Religious practices maintained over centuries |
| Identity attachment | Cultural practices tied to group identity | Regional dialect preservation despite media homogenization |
Cultural Drift: The Random Walk of Social Change
Not all cultural change is adaptive or driven by identifiable forces. Cultural drift refers to random changes that accumulate over time, analogous to genetic drift in biology. When cultural practices pass between individuals or generations, small random variations inevitably occur. Over time, these random variations can accumulate into significant cultural differences, even without any selection pressure favoring the change.
Linguist William Labov documented cultural drift in language through his pioneering studies of vowel shifts in American English. The "Northern Cities Shift," in which speakers in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo systematically changed their vowel pronunciations over the 20th century, was not driven by any identifiable functional advantage. Nobody decided that pronouncing "cot" like "cat" was better. The change simply accumulated through random variation in transmission, amplified by the tendency to copy prestigious speakers within the community.
Cultural drift is most prominent in domains where the specific content of a cultural practice matters less than its social function. Fashion is a quintessential drift domain. Whether ties are wide or narrow, skirts long or short, colors bright or muted, the specific choices carry no functional significance. They drift randomly, occasionally pushed by deliberate innovation from designers but largely floating on waves of minor variations that accumulate unpredictably. The same applies to baby naming practices, where research by Stanley Lieberson showed that name popularity follows patterns remarkably similar to random walks, with names rising and falling in fashion without any clear adaptive logic.
Cultural drift has important implications for understanding cultural diversity. When people observe differences between cultures, they often assume each difference must have a functional explanation, some reason why one group does things differently from another. Cultural drift reveals that many differences are simply the accumulated result of random variation, no more purposeful than the different shapes of clouds. This insight has important implications for cross-cultural interaction: not every cultural difference reflects a deep value disagreement, and many differences can be navigated with flexibility rather than requiring fundamental compromise.
How Subcultures Emerge, Compete, and Transform the Mainstream
Cultures are never monolithic. Within any society, subcultures develop distinct practices, values, and identities that differ from the mainstream. Understanding how subcultures form and interact with the broader culture is essential for understanding cultural evolution, because many of the most significant cultural changes in history originated in subcultures before spreading to the mainstream.
The Formation of Subcultures
Subcultures emerge through several distinct pathways. Geographic isolation produces regional subcultures as populations separated by distance drift apart culturally. The distinct cultural flavors of different American regions, including Southern hospitality, New England reserve, Midwestern friendliness, and Western individualism, all developed through centuries of relative geographic isolation that allowed local cultural drift and adaptation to local conditions.
Occupational specialization creates professional subcultures with distinct values, language, and behavioral norms. Military culture, medical culture, legal culture, and academic culture each developed distinctive features shaped by the specific demands and conditions of their respective occupations. Software development culture, with its values of meritocracy, open source sharing, casual dress, and flat organizational structures, emerged relatively recently but has become one of the most influential occupational subcultures of the 21st century, spreading its norms far beyond the technology industry.
Deliberate differentiation occurs when groups define themselves in opposition to the mainstream. Punk culture in the 1970s deliberately rejected mainstream aesthetics, musical conventions, and commercial values. The counterculture of the 1960s consciously rejected the conformist culture of the 1950s. Religious sects and intentional communities often form explicitly to practice alternative cultural values. This pathway is particularly important because it introduces cultural variation that would not arise through drift or gradual adaptation alone.
Shared adversity or marginalization binds people together and generates distinctive cultural practices. African American culture developed many of its distinctive features, including musical traditions from spirituals to jazz to hip-hop, distinctive linguistic patterns, religious practices, and social norms, in response to the shared experience of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination. LGBTQ+ subculture developed its own language, gathering spaces, art forms, and social practices in response to mainstream marginalization. These subcultures demonstrate remarkable creativity and resilience, often producing cultural innovations that eventually influence the broader society.
Subcultural Dynamics and Mainstream Absorption
The relationship between subcultures and the mainstream follows recognizable patterns. Sociologist Dick Hebdige described a recurring cycle in his seminal study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. First, a subculture develops distinctive practices that challenge or subvert mainstream norms. Then, the mainstream culture responds in two ways simultaneously: ideological incorporation, where the media redefines the subculture as harmless, exotic, or amusing; and commodity incorporation, where the market transforms subcultural style into mass-produced consumer goods.
This pattern is visible in virtually every major youth subculture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Hip-hop began as a hyperlocal subculture in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, rooted in specific conditions of urban poverty, racial marginalization, and creative resourcefulness. By the 2000s, hip-hop had been thoroughly absorbed into the commercial mainstream, its fashion marketed by luxury brands, its music dominating global charts, and its linguistic innovations entering everyday speech worldwide. The absorption process transformed hip-hop but also transformed the mainstream, which permanently incorporated elements of hip-hop culture into its fabric.
Not all subcultures get absorbed, however. Some remain deliberately marginal, resisting commercial incorporation through gatekeeping practices, ideological purity tests, or geographical concentration. The Amish have maintained their distinctive culture for centuries by deliberately limiting contact with the mainstream and creating strong institutional barriers to cultural drift. Some academic subcultures maintain their distinctiveness through specialized language and credential requirements that function as barriers to casual entry.
Can Individuals Change Culture?
The question of whether individuals can meaningfully change culture is one that recurs throughout history. The honest answer is: rarely alone, but individuals can catalyze changes that align with existing trends and conditions. The concept of the "culture entrepreneur" is useful here. Culture entrepreneurs are individuals who articulate and demonstrate new cultural possibilities that resonate with latent desires or emerging conditions. They do not create cultural change from nothing; rather, they crystallize and accelerate changes that were already incubating.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not single-handedly change American racial culture. He operated within a massive social movement, building on decades of organizing, leveraging favorable demographic and economic trends, and exploiting internal contradictions in American culture. But his particular rhetorical gifts, strategic choices, and moral authority catalyzed and accelerated changes that might otherwise have taken much longer. The same analysis applies to cultural entrepreneurs in other domains. Steve Jobs did not create the desire for personal computing or mobile connectivity; those desires were emerging from technological and demographic trends. But his particular vision and execution catalyzed a specific cultural shift around technology design and user experience that might have taken a very different form without his influence.
The conditions that enable individuals to catalyze cultural change include: a critical mass of people already dissatisfied with existing arrangements, communication channels that allow new ideas to spread rapidly, a moment of crisis or disruption that loosens attachment to the status quo, and institutional openings that provide leverage for change. Without these enabling conditions, even the most charismatic and visionary individual will fail to shift cultural patterns.
Cultural Evolution in Organizations
Organizations provide a particularly useful lens for studying cultural evolution because their smaller scale and clearer boundaries make cultural dynamics more observable. Every organization develops a culture, a set of shared assumptions, values, behavioral norms, and practices that shape how members think and act. And every organizational culture evolves over time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes through the same drift mechanisms that operate at the societal level.
How Organizational Cultures Form
Organizational culture typically begins with the founder's values and assumptions. Edgar Schein, the pioneering organizational culture researcher, argued that founders imprint their personal cultural orientations onto their organizations through hiring decisions, reward systems, and modeling. Amazon's culture of customer obsession, frugality, and data-driven decision-making reflects Jeff Bezos's personal values. Apple's culture of design perfectionism and secrecy reflected Steve Jobs's personal obsessions. These founding cultures then get reinforced through institutional mechanisms: hiring people who fit the culture, promoting those who exemplify it, and sanctioning those who violate it.
Over time, organizational cultures evolve in response to environmental pressures (market competition, regulatory changes, technological disruption), internal dynamics (generational turnover, growth and scaling challenges, success and failure experiences), and leadership transitions (new leaders who bring different cultural orientations). The cultural evolution of Microsoft is instructive. Under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the culture emphasized aggressive competition, stack-ranking performance evaluation, and internal rivalries between divisions. Under Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, the culture shifted dramatically toward collaboration, growth mindset, empathy, and openness. This cultural transformation was deliberate and systematic, involving changes to performance review systems, language, leadership development programs, and strategic priorities.
Why Organizational Culture Change Is Difficult
Despite the smaller scale, organizational culture change is notoriously difficult, for reasons that parallel societal cultural evolution. Existing culture is embedded in artifacts (office layouts, dress codes, organizational charts), espoused values (mission statements, leadership communications), and most deeply, underlying assumptions (taken-for-granted beliefs about human nature, the organization's relationship to its environment, and the nature of truth and reality). Changing artifacts is easy. Changing espoused values is harder. Changing underlying assumptions is enormously difficult because people are often unaware of them.
Research on culture change initiatives consistently finds that most efforts fail or produce only superficial change. A study by consulting firm Katzenbach Partners found that only about one-third of culture change programs achieve their intended outcomes. The most common failure mode is what researchers call "decoupling," where new cultural language and artifacts are adopted superficially while actual practices and underlying assumptions remain unchanged. Employees learn to say the right things in meetings and on surveys while continuing to operate according to the old cultural logic.
The Question of Cultural Progress
Is cultural evolution progressive? Does culture get "better" over time? This is one of the most contentious questions in the study of cultural evolution, and the answer depends entirely on what you mean by "better."
By some measures, clear directional trends are visible. Steven Pinker and others have documented long-term declines in violence, increases in life expectancy, expansions of literacy, and broadening of moral concern across human history. These trends are real and significant. They suggest that some aspects of cultural evolution have moved in directions that most people, regardless of cultural background, would consider improvements.
But "progress" is fundamentally a value judgment, and values themselves are culturally determined. A culture that maximizes individual freedom may judge itself more "advanced" than one that maximizes community solidarity, but this judgment reflects the values of the first culture, not an objective standard. Indigenous peoples who lived sustainably for millennia in specific ecosystems may have had cultural practices better adapted to long-term human survival than the industrial cultures that replaced them, even though the industrial cultures would have considered themselves more "advanced."
The most intellectually honest position is that cultures adapt to conditions, but adaptation is not the same as progress. A culture well-adapted to one set of conditions may be poorly adapted to another. The aggressive, individualistic culture that served American frontier settlement may be less well-adapted to the challenges of managing shared global resources. The hierarchical, conformist culture that enabled rapid Japanese industrialization may be less well-adapted to an economy that rewards innovation and risk-taking. Cultural evolution produces change, and that change often involves real improvements in specific measurable dimensions, but it also involves losses, trade-offs, and the creation of new problems that replace old ones.
| Dimension of Change | Evidence of "Progress" | Evidence of Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Violence | Long-term decline in per-capita violent death | Modern weapons enable mass destruction |
| Health | Dramatic increases in life expectancy | Chronic disease, mental health crises, antibiotic resistance |
| Knowledge | Exponential growth in scientific understanding | Information overload, epistemic fragmentation |
| Moral circle | Expansion of rights and moral concern | Cultural polarization over whose rights matter |
| Communication | Global instant connectivity | Erosion of deep attention, misinformation spread |
| Material welfare | Rising average living standards | Environmental degradation, inequality |
Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age
The internet and digital technologies have fundamentally altered the mechanics of cultural evolution in ways that are still being understood. Several shifts stand out as particularly significant.
Acceleration of Cultural Transmission
Digital technologies have dramatically increased the speed and reach of cultural transmission. A cultural innovation, whether a dance move, a political slogan, a business practice, or a social norm, can now spread from one person to millions within hours. The Ice Bucket Challenge went from a small regional charity event to a global phenomenon in less than two weeks in 2014, raising $115 million for ALS research. This kind of rapid cultural diffusion was simply impossible in pre-digital eras.
The acceleration has also shortened cultural cycle times. Fashion trends that once evolved over decades now cycle through in months or even weeks, driven by social media's appetite for novelty. TikTok trends can emerge, peak, and fade within days. This acceleration creates what cultural theorist Paul Virilio called "dromology," the study of speed as a force that transforms culture. When cultural evolution accelerates beyond a certain point, it changes not just the content of culture but the fundamental experience of living within a culture.
Fragmentation of Cultural Authority
Pre-digital cultural evolution was heavily mediated by institutional gatekeepers: publishers, editors, broadcasters, professors, religious leaders, and other authorities who filtered cultural content before it reached wide audiences. Digital technologies have dramatically reduced these gatekeepers' power. Anyone with a smartphone can create and distribute cultural content. The result is a massive increase in cultural variation, which in theory should accelerate cultural evolution, but also a decrease in the shared cultural references that bind societies together.
This fragmentation has produced what some researchers call "culture wars 2.0," in which different segments of a society inhabit increasingly different cultural worlds, consuming different media, absorbing different narratives, and developing different values and behavioral norms. The political polarization visible in many Western democracies is, in part, a consequence of cultural fragmentation driven by digital technology.
The Rise of Algorithmic Cultural Selection
Perhaps the most novel development is the emergence of algorithms as agents of cultural selection. Social media recommendation algorithms determine which cultural content gets amplified and which gets buried. YouTube's recommendation algorithm can make a previously obscure cultural practice (a cooking technique, a fitness routine, a musical style) go viral by recommending it to millions of users. Conversely, content that algorithms do not promote can remain invisible regardless of its quality.
This represents a historically unprecedented form of cultural selection. Unlike previous forms of selection, which operated through human choices (even if those choices were biased or constrained), algorithmic selection operates through optimization functions that are designed to maximize engagement metrics. The cultural consequences are significant: content that is emotionally arousing, controversial, or addictive gets amplified, while content that is nuanced, complex, or slow-building gets suppressed. The algorithms are, in effect, selecting for certain cultural traits over others, and the traits being selected for may not be the ones that produce healthy or functional cultures.
Practical Applications: Working With Cultural Evolution
Understanding cultural evolution has practical implications for anyone trying to navigate, influence, or adapt to cultural change.
For Organizations
Leaders attempting to change organizational culture should recognize that they are attempting to redirect an evolutionary process, not execute a design project. This means that culture change requires changing selection pressures, not just declaring new values. If the existing culture rewards aggressive competition, no amount of speeches about collaboration will change behavior until the reward systems, promotion criteria, and performance evaluation processes change. Leaders must alter the environment that selects for certain cultural traits, which then allows new traits to emerge and spread through normal transmission processes.
Organizations should also maintain cultural diversity as a source of adaptability. Companies that enforce rigid cultural conformity may achieve short-term efficiency but lose the variation needed to adapt when conditions change. Google's famous "20% time" policy, which allowed employees to spend one-fifth of their time on personal projects, functioned as a mechanism for generating cultural and innovative variation. Whether or not the specific policy was effective, the underlying principle is sound: systems that maintain variation are more adaptable than those that optimize for conformity.
For Individuals
Individuals navigating cultural change can benefit from understanding the mechanisms at work. When you find yourself resisting a cultural shift, it is worth asking whether your resistance reflects genuine concern about the change's consequences or simply status quo bias and identity attachment. When you observe a cultural difference between groups, it is worth asking whether the difference reflects a deep value disagreement or simply cultural drift that carries no functional significance. And when you want to contribute to cultural change, it is worth recognizing that individual action matters most when it aligns with existing trends, leverages communication networks, and addresses genuine dissatisfaction with current arrangements.
For Policy
Policymakers should recognize that cultural change follows its own logic and cannot simply be mandated from above. Institutional selection is a real and powerful mechanism, but it works best when it reinforces trends that are already emerging from other forces. Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933) attempted to impose cultural change through institutional force against the direction of other cultural trends, and it famously failed. By contrast, smoking reduction policies succeeded in part because they aligned with emerging health consciousness, changing aesthetic preferences, and shifting norms around personal responsibility.
The most effective cultural interventions work indirectly, by altering the conditions that shape cultural selection rather than trying to dictate cultural outcomes directly. Providing high-quality public education alters the conditions for cultural transmission. Creating public spaces for diverse cultural interaction alters the conditions for cultural contact and hybridization. Protecting freedom of expression maintains the variation that cultural evolution requires. These indirect interventions are slower and less satisfying than direct mandates, but they are far more likely to produce lasting cultural change.
The Deep Patterns of Cultural Evolution
Stepping back from specific mechanisms and forces, several deep patterns characterize cultural evolution across different societies and historical periods.
Punctuated equilibrium describes the pattern where long periods of relative cultural stability are interrupted by brief periods of rapid change. This pattern, borrowed from paleontology, applies well to cultural evolution. European culture was relatively stable throughout the medieval period, then transformed rapidly during the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution. American gender culture was relatively stable from the 1950s through the early 1960s, then changed rapidly in the late 1960s and 1970s, then partially stabilized again before a new wave of change in the 2010s. The stability periods are maintained by the resistance mechanisms discussed earlier; the rapid change periods are triggered when those mechanisms fail or are overwhelmed by accumulated pressure.
Path dependence means that the direction of cultural evolution is constrained by past choices and developments. Once a culture has evolved along a certain path, switching to an alternative path becomes increasingly difficult even if the alternative would be objectively better. Japan's culture of lifetime employment and seniority-based promotion, which developed during the post-war economic miracle, has proven remarkably resistant to change even as economic conditions have shifted dramatically. American car-dependent suburban culture, which developed in the post-war period through specific policy and infrastructure choices, persists even as its environmental and social costs become increasingly apparent, because the physical infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and lifestyle patterns built around it create powerful path dependence.
Coevolution describes the pattern where different elements of culture evolve in response to each other. Technology and social norms coevolve: new technologies enable new social practices, which generate new cultural norms, which in turn shape the demand for and design of further technologies. Economic systems and family structures coevolve: industrialization transformed family structures from extended kinship networks to nuclear families, which transformed labor markets, which further transformed family structures. Political institutions and cultural values coevolve: democratic institutions foster individualistic values, which increase demands for democratic participation, which strengthens democratic institutions. These coevolutionary dynamics make cultural evolution far more complex and unpredictable than simple cause-and-effect models suggest.
Convergent evolution occurs when different cultures independently develop similar practices in response to similar conditions. Agriculture was independently invented in at least seven different locations worldwide. Writing was independently invented in at least three locations. Hierarchical social organization has emerged in virtually every large-scale society. These convergences suggest that certain cultural forms are strongly favored by certain environmental conditions, just as certain biological forms (wings, eyes, streamlined bodies) have evolved independently in multiple lineages. At the same time, the specific details of these convergent solutions vary enormously, reflecting the role of historical contingency and cultural drift in shaping the particular path each culture takes.
References and Further Reading
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origin-and-evolution-of-cultures-9780195181456
Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178431/the-secret-of-our-success
Inglehart, R. (2018). Cultural Evolution: People's Motivations Are Changing, and Reshaping the World. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cultural-evolution/D7E33E5B977CE5B2A4C28CD528862D5B
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Organizational+Culture+and+Leadership
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Subculture-The-Meaning-of-Style/Hebdige/p/book/9780415039499
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674212770
Lieberson, S. (2000). A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300083866/a-matter-of-taste/
Mead, M. (1970). Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. Doubleday. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198764/culture-and-commitment-by-margaret-mead/
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Blackwell. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Principles+of+Linguistic+Change%2C+Volume+1%3A+Internal+Factors-p-9780631179146
Portes, A. & Rumbaut, R. G. (2001). Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520228481/legacies
Pieterse, J. N. (2009). Globalization and Culture: Global Melange (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742556072/Globalization-and-Culture-Global-Mlange-Second-Edition
Young, H. P. (2015). The evolution of social norms. Annual Review of Economics, 7, 359-387. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115322
Bell, D. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/daniel-bell/the-cultural-contradictions-of-capitalism/9780465097296/
Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2nd ed.). University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520271425/unequal-childhoods