Collective Understanding and Culturally Transmitted Technology: Revealing Local Knowledge in Three African Communities

In the study of human cultural evolution, many theorists hold that technologies are transmitted and improved more through imitation rather than causal understanding. This view stems from results of studies that ask individuals in isolation about technologies they use, appearing to reveal a lack of causal understanding. Here, we introduce a new method to assess the knowledge of a group, that allows individuals to view their neighbors’ answers before deciding what the best answer might be from among those provided by the group. We asked individuals in three farming communities from Morocco (N = 203), Mali (N = 198), Ghana (N = 120) to explain the causal processes behind local technologies. Our method reveals that when participants can review the answers provided by their peers, the most popular final answer is more reliable than when individuals provide answers in isolation. This indicates a division of labor in how causal knowledge is stored in the community – while most individuals may have poor causal knowledge, they recognize and defer to the best answer in the group. This shows that collectively the community is more knowledgeable than methods used up to now have indicated.