Cultural Transmission

The economic literature analyses cultural transmission as the result of interactions between purposeful socialization decisions inside the family (‘direct vertical socialization’) and indirect socialization processes like social imitation and learning (‘oblique and horizontal socialization’). This article reviews the main contribution of these models from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents the implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits, and discusses the links with other approaches to cultural evolution in the social sciences as well as in evolutionary biology. Applications to economic problems are also briefly surveyed.