Why Creativity Is Distinct From Individual Learning

Evolutionary trees that show how any one species is related to any other are fascinating and informative. Since, like biological organisms, cultural artifacts evolve, it seems reasonable to develop something analogous for culture. (Indeed, the goal of the Cultural Lineages Project is to, using repositories such as Google Patents, Google Scholar, and Wikipedia, create a gigantic "cultural evolution map" showing how each innovation took root in earlier ones.)

To trace all the "cultural ancestors" of each invention or artwork is unachievable because complex ideas are influenced by innumerable factors, some of which their creators are not consciously aware. However, a low-resolution cultural evolution map is within reach. After all, many inventions are just variations on previous ones (e.g., someone added a handle to the pot, and someone else added a spout). Moreover, creators can usually point to one or more major influence(s), or "cultural ancestors," of their creative works (Scotney et al., 2019).

To be useful, this cultural evolution map would not show each instance of knowledge transmission (e.g., it would leave out when you or I learned of the electric toothbrush) but would focus on when knowledge came into existence (e.g., when the electric toothbrush was invented). It should enable you to zoom out and see where any cultural output sits in the grand scheme of things (e.g., what led up to electric toothbrushes), and zoom in to see what cognitive steps (e.g., concept combination, metaphor, simplification, and so forth) were necessary to any given contribution.

Cognitive Processes That Fuel Cultural Change

Unfortunately, however, there is little in the cultural evolution literature that could inform such a project, because this literature has focused on how existing knowledge gets transmitted through processes such as imitation, as opposed to how knowledge comes about in the first place. In other words, the emphasis has been on the part of culture that is so redundant that, in our cultural evolution map, it gets left out! The cognitive processes that actually fuel cumulative cultural change have been largely ignored; discussion of cognitive processes is focused on phenomena such as "prestige bias" (wherein prestigious people are more likely to be imitated; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).

This literature has assumed that culture evolves through a combination of individual learning and social learning. However, individual learning + social learning doesn’t necessarily ensure cumulative cultural evolution. Individual learning refers to the process by which a particular agent acquires new knowledge or information or adopts a new strategy or representation of a situation (Novarese, 2012). In social learning, another individual, such as a teacher or caregiver, facilitates the learning process (e.g., Marriott & Chebib, 2014). Social learning merely transmits existing knowledge from one individual to another, and, often, this is also the case for individual learning, as when it occurs by way of reading a book or looking at a painting. These processes alter what knowledge is possessed by a given individual, but not what knowledge is possessed by the society as a whole; they’re insufficient to ensure cumulative change.

Individual learning also includes learning arising from direct observation of the nonsocial environment (e.g., learning to differentiate USB-C ports from Thunderbolt ports by looking closely at them). However, this rarely generates new information; it makes existing information available to one more person, but someone else has usually made the distinction before you (e.g., although you couldn’t previously tell USB-C ports from Thunderbolt ports, somebody could).

Occasionally, individual learning through direct observation does bring information that existed in the world at large—but was not heretofore known to humans—into the cultural sphere (as when someone discovers a new species of butterfly). This may even facilitate cumulative cultural change (e.g., it may foster a new understanding of butterfly adaptations). However, the role of happenstance discovery in cumulative cultural evolution is limited because it is triggered by the external environment, rather than capitalizing on the fact that humans are driven to create, and do so using strategy, intuition, planning, and mental and physical dexterity.

Cultural Novelty and Creativity

Indeed, cultural novelty usually involves creativity. Direct observation may trigger or ‘catalyze’ creativity (e.g., observation of butterflies may facilitate the writing of a poem about butterflies), but creativity requires something more: a need or drive that motivates internal cognitive change. This need or drive can arise from curiosity, a problem or inconsistency, or a desire to capture a feeling, express oneself, or come to terms with something.

Creativity is less passive than individual learning through direct observation; it actively stimulates the generation of new information from existing information. In some accounts, individual learning is assumed to encompass, not just the learning process by which existing information becomes accessible to an individual, but also the creative processes by which new information is generated by the individual (e.g., Boyette, 2016). However, since creative cognition and individual learning (from artifacts, or through observation of the natural world) play different roles in cultural evolution, it seems valuable to differentiate between them.

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To fully appreciate this, it is important to recognize that cultural evolution, like biological evolution, must balance factors that foster continuity through the imitation and perpetuation of "tried and true" outputs, with factors that foster creativity through the generation of new (and possibly superior) outputs (Gabora, 2018, 2019; Gabora & Tseng, 2016). (The first is the "conservative," exploitative component, while the second is the "liberal," exploratory component.) However, even with both social learning and individual learning in place, there is no guarantee of creativity; both may contribute only to the perpetuation of existing knowledge. For example, a scenario involving social learning by way of caregivers and individual learning by way of books or museum visits entails only transmission of existing knowledge, not the generation of new knowledge; thus, there is no cumulative cultural evolution. It is by injecting creativity into this scenario that human drives catalyze the transformation of existing knowledge into new knowledge, and culture evolves.