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The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge

A wide variety of cultural practices have a ‘tacit’ dimension, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can ta...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Miton, Helena, DeDeo, Simon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36259172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0238
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author Miton, Helena
DeDeo, Simon
author_facet Miton, Helena
DeDeo, Simon
author_sort Miton, Helena
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description A wide variety of cultural practices have a ‘tacit’ dimension, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? We present a domain-general model of ‘tacit teaching’, drawn from statistical physics, that shows how high-accuracy transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies when the practice’s underlying features are subject to interacting and competing constraints. Our model makes predictions for key features of the teaching process. It predicts a tell-tale distribution of teaching outcomes, with some students near-perfect performers while others receiving the same instruction are disastrously bad. This differs from standard cultural evolution models that rely on direct, high-fidelity copying, which lead to a much narrower distribution of mostly mediocre outcomes. The model also predicts generic features of the cultural evolution of tacit knowledge. The evolution of tacit knowledge is expected to be bursty, with long periods of stability interspersed with brief periods of dramatic change, and where tacit knowledge, once lost, becomes essentially impossible to recover.
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spelling pubmed-95797692022-10-25 The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge Miton, Helena DeDeo, Simon J R Soc Interface Life Sciences–Physics interface A wide variety of cultural practices have a ‘tacit’ dimension, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? We present a domain-general model of ‘tacit teaching’, drawn from statistical physics, that shows how high-accuracy transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies when the practice’s underlying features are subject to interacting and competing constraints. Our model makes predictions for key features of the teaching process. It predicts a tell-tale distribution of teaching outcomes, with some students near-perfect performers while others receiving the same instruction are disastrously bad. This differs from standard cultural evolution models that rely on direct, high-fidelity copying, which lead to a much narrower distribution of mostly mediocre outcomes. The model also predicts generic features of the cultural evolution of tacit knowledge. The evolution of tacit knowledge is expected to be bursty, with long periods of stability interspersed with brief periods of dramatic change, and where tacit knowledge, once lost, becomes essentially impossible to recover. The Royal Society 2022-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC9579769/ /pubmed/36259172 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0238 Text en © 2022 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Life Sciences–Physics interface
Miton, Helena
DeDeo, Simon
The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title_full The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title_fullStr The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title_full_unstemmed The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title_short The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
title_sort cultural transmission of tacit knowledge
topic Life Sciences–Physics interface
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36259172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0238
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