| Summary: | Due to the critical importance of social norms and their ubiquitous presence over the course of human history, culture-gene co-evolutionary processes should have selected for a psychological architecture that supports learning and implementing local norms (Richerson & Henrich, 2009). In this thesis, I follow the above line of reasoning to argue that dealing with social norms presented domain-specific challenges to the cultural learner, requiring specialized cognitive processes to deal specifically with norms. This motivates several predictions about major design features that a psychological architecture evolved to meet those challenges should possess. I present a survey of extant evidence that are consistent with these predictions. Two empirical studies designed to test a number of these predictions are presented. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
|
|---|
