Conformist transmission makes social learning humanity's primary cognitive mode

Joseph Henrich's finding: evolution didn't prioritize independent thinking. Humanity succeeded not because of the intelligence of atomic individuals, but because we learned to outsource knowledge to the tribe. Humans are such prolific imitators that they copy even unnecessary stylistic movements of people they admire — mostly outside conscious awareness. They copy opinions too. Henrich calls this "conformist transmission."

Chimpanzees and two-and-a-half-year-olds show little difference on working memory and information processing. Social learning is the glaring exception. That's humanity's primary advantage over primates — and the secret of our success.

The problem is that this mechanism doesn't turn off when the tribe is wrong. Ideas go in and out of fashion exactly like clothing. If we could see ideas in photos, we'd laugh at our own thinking the way we laugh at 70s fashion. The Internet appears to have accelerated the rate at which new ideas become trendy, compounding the risk. A culture needs people who can reason independently — sturdy steel beams in the winds of social change — as counterweight to the conformist baseline.

[!NOTE] People who feel the most authentic are, per one study, actually more likely to betray their true nature and conform to socially approved qualities. Authenticity is often conformism in disguise.

Source claim: Social learning — not individual intelligence — is humanity's primary cognitive advantage, which means conformist transmission of ideas is the default, not the exception.