Abstract
The ratchet effect–the gradual accumulation of changes within a cultural trait beyond a level that individuals can achieve on their own–arguably rests on two key cognitive abilities: high-fidelity social learning and innovation. Researchers have started to simulate the ratchet effect in the laboratory to identify its underlying social learning mechanisms, but studies on the developmental origins of the ratchet effect remain sparse. We used the transmission chain method and a tower construction task that had previously been used with adults to investigate whether “generations” of children between 4 and 6 years were able to make a technological product that individual children could not yet achieve. 21 children in a baseline and 80 children in transmission chains (each consisting of 10 successive children) were asked to build something as tall as possible from plasticine and sticks. Children in the chains were presented with the constructions of the two preceding generations (endstate demonstration). Results showed that tower heights did not increase across the chains nor were they different from the height of baseline towers, demonstrating a lack of improvement in tower height. However, we found evidence for cultural lineages, i.e., construction styles: towers within chains were more similar to each other than to towers from different chains. Possible explanations for the findings and directions for future research are suggested.
Highlights
The ability to produce cumulative culture–i.e., cultural traits that could not have been created within a single lifetime but instead are the result of an evolutionary process over time and individuals–is often argued to be a uniquely human phenomenon and has recently even been marked as the “secret of our success” [2,3,4,5,6]
There were no differences in tower height between boys and girls in either condition, so data were collapsed across gender
The lack of an age effect seems to be in contrast to the age effect found in Reindl et al [17]; note that the age range in the baseline condition of the current study (4y5m – 5y1m) was smaller than the age range of the pilot study in Reindl et al [17] (4y1m – 5y9m), which might have minimized the effect of age on performance differences between children in the current study; in addition, the age effect of the main study in Reindl et al [17] was only very small (with each SD increase in age (4.31 months), average tower height increased by 2.91 cm (R2 = .07))
Summary
The ability to produce cumulative culture–i.e., cultural traits (e.g., technological products, instrumental skills and knowledge) that could not have been created within a single lifetime but instead are the result of an evolutionary process over time and individuals (a phenomenon called the ratchet effect [1])–is often argued to be a uniquely human phenomenon and has recently even been marked as the “secret of our success” [2,3,4,5,6]. Trying to identify the reasons for this uniqueness, researchers have started to study the cognitive mechanisms underpinning cumulative cultural evolution [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. The current literature suggests high-fidelity social transmission and a capacity for innovation as the main–but perhaps not the only–cognitive
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