ArticleReview of philosophy and psychology2018
Human Teaching and Cumulative Cultural Evolution.
Article in Review of philosophy and psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sex Biases in Patterns of Parental Investment.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Growing Communicators: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Toddlers' Communicative Intentions From Requestive and Expressive, to Information Seeking and Giving.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2026Article
- A Rapid Cortical Learning Process Supporting Students' Knowledge Construction During Real Classroom Teaching.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.Nature communications · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The neural underpinnings of repeated skill transfer in human cultural evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Collaborative decision making is grounded in representations of other people's competence and effort.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Teaching strategies are shaped by experience with formal education: Experimental evidence from caregiver-child dyads in two Tannese communities.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- The cultural evolution of teaching.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Costly teaching contributes to the acquisition of spear hunting skill among BaYaka forager adolescents.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Observational
- Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Orangutan mothers adjust their behaviour during food solicitations in a way that likely facilitates feeding skill acquisition in their offspring.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Technical reasoning is important for cumulative technological culture.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The Life History of Learning Subsistence Skills among Hadza and BaYaka Foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture (here meaning cultural evolution featuring a trend towards improving functionality) can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone (End State Only condition), and also relative to information about the process of completion (Intermediate States condition). We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.