The Cultural Animal

"This book not only summarizes what we know about people - it also offers a coherent, easy-to-understand, though radical, explanation. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, Roy Baumeister argues that culture shaped human evolution. Contrary to theories that depict the individual's relation to society as one of victimization, endless malleability, or just a square peg in a round hole, his proposal states that the individual human being is designed by nature to be part of society. The Cultural Animal maintains that natural selection shaped the human psyche in two stages, the first for the sake of being social, and the second for the sake of being cultural. Being cultural is a step beyond being social. To be social is to have interactions and relationships, but to be cultural is to belong to a community of similar minds that collectively maintains, transmits, and accumulates information in its network. Moreover, Baumeister argues that we need to briefly set aside the endless study of cultural differences to look at what most cultures have in common - because that holds the key to human nature. Culture is in our genes, although cultural differences may not be."--Jacket.