Abstract
Cumulative culture, where innovations are progressively incorporated into a
population’s stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated
repertoires, is a core aspect of human cognition that underpins the technological
advances which characterize our species. Cumulative culture relies on our proclivity
for high fidelity imitation, something that emerged phylogenetically early in our
evolutionary history and emerges ontogenetically early in our development.
Commensurate with this proclivity to copy others comes a tradeoff that functionally
irrelevant behaviors will be easily maintained and transmitted. Rituals are an
expression of this. In this paper, I set out the argument that the core cognitive
architecture responsible for cumulative culture and technological progress has the
same origin as that which propagates rituals: That is, our socially-motivated
propensity for engaging in high-fidelity imitation.