Cultural Change through the Interplay between Actors and Environments: Niche Construction and a Multilevel Approach

Researchers theorize cultural change as societal adaptation to the environment. However, the ecological framework typically ignores the fact that people systematically create their own environment, effectively changing the ecology to which they adapt. Here we advance conceptual and analytical tools for a more dynamic framework of cultural change. First, we draw on the theory of niche construction to argue that organisms modify their environments in ways that impact their own evolution. Second, we advocate for a multilevel approach to analyze heterogeneity of longitudinal processes across multiple units: cultural change can be understood as a within-society process nested within higher-level units that differ across space. We then apply a distributed lag/lead model, which owes to multilevel modeling, to identify the mutual causality between environment and culture. Focusing on the 50 U.S. states, we analyzed how modernization variables—wealth and individualism—functioned to reduce tuberculosis (TB, 1993-2018) and sexually transmitted diseases (STD, 1984-2014). We found evidence for reciprocal causation: modernization generally preceded reduction of TB and STD, but decrease in these diseases also increased future wealth and individualism. Moreover, the positive impacts of modernization on mitigating future diseases were stronger among collectivistic states, especially for the relationship between rising individualism and reduction of STD. We explore the virtues and limitations of this approach, but encourage a more dynamic approach in research on cultural change.