Individuals and communities preferentially attend to and learn from more successful or prestigious groups. This causes social norms and beliefs to diffuse from more successful groups to less successful ones and can drive the spread of more competitive institutions.

Institutions usually remain inscrutable to those operating within them—like water to fish. Because cultural evolution generally operates slowly, subtly, and outside conscious awareness, people rarely understand how or why their institutions work or even that they “do” anything.

Humans are a cultural species. Our brains and psychology are specialized for acquiring, storing, and organizing information gleaned from the minds and behaviors of others. Our cultural learning abilities directly reprogram our minds, recalibrate our preferences, and adapt our perceptions.

On a larger scale, beyond people’s interdependent networks, cultural evolution also created a mosaic of diverse communities that generated selection pressures favoring a tribal psychology. Because of how we learn from others, cultural evolution frequently produces ethnolinguistic communities. These populations are marked both by a cluster of easily

social norms increasingly wove webs of interdependence among the individuals within groups. Driven by intergroup competition, norms created social safety nets, enforced widespread food sharing, and fostered communal defense.

the reputational damage and punishment associated with norm violations would have favored a psychology that rapidly recognizes the existence of social rules, accurately infers the details of these rules, readily judges the compliance of others, and, at least partially, internalizes the local norms as fast-and-frugal heuristics for navigating the so

Synchronous movement, rhythmic music, and goal-oriented teamwork all interact to endow rituals with their power to infuse participants with communal feelings and an expansive sense of interconnectedness and interdependence.

That is, working together in highly orchestrated ways, in sync to rhythmic music, magnifies our sense of solidarity and willingness to cooperate more powerfully than simply the sum of the effects of each separate element. This “orchestrated teamwork effect” likely harnesses our interdependence psychology,

Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways.