Identifying culture as cause: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Causal inference lies at the core of many scientific endeavours. Yet, answering causal questions is challenging, especially when studying culture as a causal force. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews research designs and statistical tools that can be used—together with strong theory and knowledge about the context of study—to identify the causal impact of culture on outcomes of interest. We especially discuss how overlooked strategies in cultural evolutionary studies can allow one to approximate an ideal experiment wherein culture is randomly assigned to individuals or entire groups (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity design, and epidemiological approach). In doing so, we also review the potential outcome framework as a tool to engage in causal reasoning in the cultural evolutionary field.

Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia

“…A necessary but not sufficient condition for cultural group selection is that groups are different from each other specifically because of cultural evolutionary processes. This is easy to say but hard to pin down in terms of what it might actually mean for the working empiricist (Lonati et al, 2024 ). Groups can be different for all sorts of reasons.…”

“…One straightforward work-around is what is sometimes called the ‘epidemiological’ approach to identifying cultural variation (Fernández, 2011 ; Lonati et al, 2024 ). The basic idea is to compare people who have different cultural backgrounds but live in one place under a common set of institutions and economic conditions.…”