Joseph Henrich: University of British Columbia Departments of Psychology and Economics

This talk will first develop an evolutionarily-informed, cognitively-grounded approach to culture, and then apply this approach to explain patterns of food taboos for pregnant and lactating women on Yasawa Island, Fiji. Within a broader cognitive framework, I focus on (1) understanding our capacities for cultural learning as evolved cognitive mechanisms for acquiring adaptive information from other individuals, in a complex, noisy, and changing world, and (2) examining how and when these learning mechanisms result in cumulative cultural evolutionary processes that produce population-level patterns of adaptation and maladaptation. Then, applying this framework, I will argue that the patterns of food taboos observed across three villages in Fiji represent a culturally-evolved adaptation, influenced by various cognitive biases, that protects women, fetuses, and infants from dangerous marine toxins. Our findings indicate that these patterns likely emerged, and are now maintained, by the operation of the cultural learning mechanisms predicted by our evolutionary approach to cognition.