ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2022
The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Analogies evolve by increasing transmission fidelity in the communication of complex information.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Indigenous knowledge systems and malaria prevention in Zimbabwe: a market basket analysis.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- Tacit Knowledge in Cooking: A Key to Teaching and Integrating Cooking as a Practice.Journal of nutrition education and behavior · 2025Article
- Norms emerge through iterated learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Inferring Cultural Landscapes with the Inverse Ising Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A wide variety of cultural practices have a 'tacit' dimension, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? We present a domain-general model of 'tacit teaching', drawn from statistical physics, that shows how high-accuracy transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies when the practice's underlying features are subject to interacting and competing constraints. Our model makes predictions for key features of the teaching process. It predicts a tell-tale distribution of teaching outcomes, with some students near-perfect performers while others receiving the same instruction are disastrously bad. This differs from standard cultural evolution models that rely on direct, high-fidelity copying, which lead to a much narrower distribution of mostly mediocre outcomes. The model also predicts generic features of the cultural evolution of tacit knowledge. The evolution of tacit knowledge is expected to be bursty, with long periods of stability interspersed with brief periods of dramatic change, and where tacit knowledge, once lost, becomes essentially impossible to recover.
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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.