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Like Me: A Homophily-Based Account of Human Culture

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Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce a homophilic account of human social structure and cultural transmission. According to this account, a tendency to favour similar others (homophily) has been a key driving force in creating unique human forms of culture and thus evoked the striking differences we observe between human groups. We begin by presenting evidence that, from the early stages of development, humans have shown a strong tendency to interact with, and learn from, individuals who are similar to themselves. Following this, we propose that the homophilic preferences of the group in general has created a feedback loop that ensures that children engage in high-fidelity copying of the group’s behavioural repertoire. This allows children to reap the benefits of others’ homophilic preferences and to therefore maintain their position within the group. In consequence, homophilic preferences have transformed a number of mechanisms that we share with other species, for example emulation and majority-biased transmission, into human unique variants such as social imitation and conformity. Homophilic preferences have furthermore spawned a new tendency to interpret the structure of actions as social signals: norm-psychology. The homophily account thus connects previously disparate findings in comparative, developmental, and social psychology and provides a unified account of the importance of the preference for similar others in species-specific human social behaviour.

This chapter was originally published in Richerson, Peter J., and Morten H. Christiansen, eds., Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, chapter: “Like Me: A Homophily-Based Account of Human Culture”, © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, by permission of The MIT Press.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Malinda Carpenter, Emma Cohen, Emma Flynn, Katja Liebal, Nadja Richter, Carel van Schaik, Claudio Tennie, Marco Schmidt, Peter Richerson, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. University of Jena, Jena, Germany

    Daniel Haun

  2. University of York, York, UK

    Harriet Over

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Correspondence to Daniel Haun .

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  1. a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Cologne, Germany

    Thiemo Breyer

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Haun, D., Over, H. (2015). Like Me: A Homophily-Based Account of Human Culture. In: Breyer, T. (eds) Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1387-9_6

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