It’s widely believed that the success of mankind has largely been based upon our ability to grasp the usefulness of tools and wield them for our advantage.  It’s believed that humans have higher levels of causal reasoning than other animals, which has supported our ability to invent such useful tools.

New research from Arizona State University proposes that cultural evolution can help to generate new knowledge, even if people don’t really understand what it is they’re doing.  The study suggests that even in the most traditional of societies, human technology can often be too complex for it to be the product of human wits alone.  This theory suggests that we accumulate a lot of micro-behaviors, even whilst not really understanding them fully.

The researchers tested their hypothesis via a lab-based exercise to try and simulate improvements made across generations.  Volunteers were shown an image of a wheel with four spokes resting on an inclined ramp.  Each spoke had a weight attached that the volunteers could move closer or further away from the hub of the wheel.  The ultimate goal was to help the wheel roll to the bottom of the ramp as quickly as possible, and the weights could be moved to achieve that goal.

The volunteers were arranged into 14 groups, each containing five people.  The groups were structured as a ‘transmission chain’, whereby the first participant was given a few attempts at improving the wheel, with subsequent volunteers then able to observe and try and adopt the learning from each preceding volunteer.

Improved results

As you might expect, across the 14 groups, results tended to get better and better, with the wheel typically going as fast as possible by the end of the final group.  This improvement was achieved despite the participants not really understanding why or how it was achieved.  At the end, each volunteer was asked to complete a test to measure their causal understanding, and it showed no improvement in their understanding from the start of the experiment.

The team then conducted a second experiment to try and discover why this occurred.  This second experiment required participants to provide a written explanation of their strategy, and whilst they were generally able to do so, it still didn’t translate into systematic improvements in understanding.  Instead, it was common for some participants to have a part of the explanation, but precious few having the whole.

“Most participants actually produced incorrect or incomplete theories despite the relative simplicity of the physical system,” the authors explain. “This constrained subsequent experimentation and prevented participants from discovering more efficient solutions.”

The findings are interesting and help to explain how complex tools can emerge in even the simplest of societies.  It suggests that intelligence is not the be all and end all, and that our ability to learn from each other allows us to cumulate quite significant cultural adaptations, even when we don’t really understand the tools we’re using.