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Abstract

Cultural complexity entails the presence of a multitude of social networks, social groups, hierarchies, power structures, roles, positions, and/or divisions. Whereas kinship is the primary organizational concept in simpler societies, complex societies have multiple levels of crosscutting ties, affiliations, responsibilities, membership, values, norms, and rights. Individuals pursue their own particular goals through social networks, and no two people have the exact same network or objectives. Perhaps the key difference between simple societies and complex societies is the presence of social power, that is, the means by which human actors can manipulate others in the pursuit of social goals.

Outline

Cultural Complexity: A Recent Phenomenon
Cultural Complexity Defined
Theories on the Origins of Cultural Complexity
Measuring Cultural Complexity
Cultural Complexity and Dimensions of Cultural Variation
Globalization and Cultural Complexity

1. Cultural Complexity: A Recent Phenomenon

Cultural complexity is a recent phenomenon of human society. Paleoanthropology and the fossil record reveal a record of at least 5 million to 6 million years of hominid evolution. Hominids with large brain cases, the genus Homo, date back to circa 2 million years ago. Archaic Homo sapiens, including the Neanderthals, stretch back to perhaps 400,000 years ago. Our own species, Homo sapiens, can trace its origin to Africa some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Yet even after the appearance of physically modern humans (with brains apparently as large and complex as our own), human culture and society remained relatively simple for tens of thousands of years. Despite having the same mental ‘‘hardware’’ as we do today, humans showed no flashes of art, complex organization, ethnicity, or other indications of significant change until the Upper Paleolithic period in the Old World circa 40,000 years ago. Even so, this early fluorescence of art, religion, technology, ethnicity, identity, and other human cultural hallmarks was still characterized by small and mobile populations, the lack of institutionalized leadership, extremely limited social power, and fairly simple social networks.

It is not until the first appearance of dense population, food surpluses, and settled villages roughly 10,000 years ago (the Neolithic period in the Old World and somewhat later during the Formative period of the New World) that cultural complexity can first be discerned in the human record. Since that point, there has been a drastic trend toward fewer and more complex societies. Eventually, chiefdoms, archaic states, and early empires in turn gave rise to modern nation-states during the 19th century. The 20th century witnessed the rise of economic, political, and cultural globalization. Clearly, there has been a breakneck rush toward ever higher levels of cultural complexity over the past few centuries. Perhaps as a consequence of this pattern of historical evolution, cultural complexity has been used primarily to characterize premodern societies rather than to differentiate between modern nation-states.

Social scientists interested in the relationship between human culture and biology should keep this point clearly in focus: The modern complex human brain was in place far earlier than were the complex cultural and social manifestations that it permits. Evolutionary psychologists should be cognizant of this when inferring connections between current human social behavior and the biological apparatus of the mind.

2. Cultural Complexity Defined

Given that it is a central theoretical concept in the social sciences, especially anthropology, an explicit definition of cultural complexity is surprisingly hard to pin down. Carneiro provided one influential perspective, arguing that complexity focuses on society as a structural end product, whereas evolution focuses on the processes that gave rise to this. Following Spencer, Carneiro defined evolution as ‘‘a change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.’’ Hence, cultural complexity would be characterized by coherent heterogeneity—a state of organized differentiation. Such a definition is necessarily vague in that cultural complexity is used primarily as a relative term to rank order various cultures and societies (and this can be done reliably) rather than standing alone in terms of essential meaning according to necessary traits or attributes.

Cultural complexity entails the presence of a multitude of social networks, social groups, hierarchies, power structures, roles, positions, and/or divisions. Whereas kinship is the primary organizational concept in simpler societies, complex societies have multiple levels of crosscutting ties, affiliations, responsibilities, membership, values, norms, and rights. Individuals pursue their own particular goals through social networks, and no two people have the exact same network or objectives. Perhaps the key difference between simple societies and complex societies is the presence of social power by which human actors manipulate others in pursuit of social goals. With social power comes the potential for social inequality, ranking, hierarchy, and social stratification. It is also possible, however, to have multiple divisions of horizontal rather than vertical power, that is, heterarchy rather than hierarchy. In such cases, there is a different but equal distribution of power.

3. Theories On The Origins Of Cultural Complexity

A wide range of theoretical perspectives has been employed to understand how and why human cultures become complex. Progressivists such as Locke first opened the door to explaining differences in human societies without recourse to religious or mythological causes. By the mid-19th century, naturalists and social scientists alike were profoundly influenced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Social Darwinists such as Spencer and early anthropologists such as Tylor applied evolutionary concepts to the development of human society. Morgan and other unilineal cultural evolutionists believed simplistically that human societies naturally progressed through a series of stages usually tied to economic or technological patterns. Such thinkers, unfortunately, tended to invoke racial arguments to explain differences in cultures and their level of attainment. Nevertheless, such thinking had a strong influence on Marx in his theories of social evolution and economic materialism. Similarly, Freud was heavily influenced by unilineal evolution as he outlined the development of human societies from simple to complex through universal psychological patterns.

The early and mid-20th century saw two major perspectives on cultural complexity struggle for supremacy in both American and European social sciences. ‘‘Multilinear evolutionists’’ favored materialist explanations focused on economics, technology, energy, ecology, and the like. Unlike their 19th-century predecessors, however, these theories recognized numerous causal factors and possible cultural trajectories. Evolutionists rarely gave credence to ideology, symbolism, or the role of the individual. Cultural relativists, on the other hand, avoided generalizations and focused instead on the diffusion of cultural traits or functional descriptions of culture and social structure. The most prominent example in American cultural relativism is Boas. In Europe, social theory was led by schools of sociology (e.g., Durkheim, Mauss, Weber), structuralism (e.g., Levi-Strauss), and functionalism (e.g., Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard). These perspectives often downplayed materialism and instead employed ideology, symbolism, and deep cognitive structures as causal factors. Some of these perspectives also attached great importance to the role of the individual as a cultural actor with agency.

The social sciences, however, did develop a synthesis view of cultural evolution and cultural complexity by the end of the 20th century. It recognizes that extreme views are unlikely to derive a parsimonious explanation for all cases. Mann has been a leading figure of the synthesis through his multidimensional social power theory, which stresses that individuals are agents that pursue their goals through overlapping networks of economic, military, political, and economic power. Social power is the means by which individuals acquire and manipulate the flow of information, energy, social status, wealth, and other resources.

Social scientists during the past few decades have had a more sophisticated view of cultural complexity, one that takes account of a variety of overlapping factors.

4. Measuring Cultural Complexity

A recent review by Chick outlined three major approaches to the measurement of cultural complexity (a broader review of seven specific measures was developed earlier by Levinson and Malone). The three types of measures are highly correlated, and each has specific strengths and weaknesses. The approaches are (a) attribute counting procedures, (b) development scores based on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), and (c) maximum settlement size.

The first measure is termed ‘‘culture by accretion.’’ In this method, cultural complexity is assessed by an attribute checklist; the greater the number of attributes possessed, the greater the complexity score. As few as 50 and as many as 618 attributes have been used. The greater the number used, the more accurate the score and the greater the ability to differentiate between cultures at similar levels of complexity. If only a limited number is chosen (e.g., 50), items conforming optimally to Guttman scaling procedures are required. Domains for the attributes (or traits) used by Carneiro in 1970 were economics, social organizations and stratification, political organization, law and judicial process, warfare, religion, art, tools–utensils–textiles, metalworking, watercraft and navigation, and special knowledge and practices. Sample items included the presence or absence of markets, military conscription, special religious practitioners, and temples. Most of the items were related to technological and organizational elements of culture rather than expressive ones, but the breadth of the attributes nonetheless allows researchers to empirically assess the level of cultural complexity.

Although comprehensive, reliable, and accurate, such measures have fallen out of fashion due to the difficulty in obtaining scores for such a large number of attributes and because the attributes chosen seem to be specific to cultures at certain stages of development. They measure increases in structure rather than growth in the size of a structure (e.g., a society with 7 judges is of equal complexity to a society with 7000 judges in this system). Because the most complex society studied by Carneiro was the Roman Empire, such domains as information technology or energy sources were not assessed in his scoring system.

The second approach, perhaps the best known among the approaches, is based on 10 indicators of development from the SCSS, with each being rated from 0 to 4 and largely focused on technology: writing and records, fixity of residence, agriculture, urbanization, technological specialization, land transport, money, population density, political integration, and social stratification. In 1973, Murdock and Provost reported a correlation of .95 between their scale and Carneiro’s scale using a sample of 45 societies common to both studies.

Because this measure depends on rating the degree of sophistication of a few indicators rather than counting the presence or absence of many attributes, Chick called it ‘‘complexity by elaboration.’’ The measure factors into two dimensions: social and technological complexity and the complexity of human ecology. Like Carneiro’s measure, the sample of the SCCS has few complex modern societies, and so the top end of the scale might not differentiate well. Chick argued that the scale does not adequately assess expressive elements of culture such as arts and dance. But in 1972, Lomax and Berkowitz provided evidence that cultures synchronize activity in productive efforts and expressive performance.

Finally, and most succinctly, there is a measure of complexity by magnitude. Drawing from previous work showing a .97 correlation between Carneiro’s scale and the logarithm of maximum settlement population, Naroll and Divale argued in 1976 that maximum settlement population is the single best measure of cultural complexity. The reason for this can be found in Carneiro’s 1987 study of single-community societies (i.e., autonomous bands and villages). He reported that the organizational complexity of a village increases as the two-thirds power of its population. Villages that do not increase in organizational complexity as their population increases tend to fall apart. Extrapolating from this, it follows that in larger societies there should also be a mathematical relationship between maximum settlement size and the amount of organizational and technological complexity required to provide for and hold together these populations.

It would be difficult to apply this measure to nonsedentary populations, and it does not capture the types of cultural complexity afforded by globe-spanning mass communication and information technologies. It would also imply that Japan, with more than 30 million people living in agglomeration around metropolitan Tokyo, is the most complex society in the world today.

To summarize, despite difficulty in providing a precise conceptual definition of cultural complexity, and despite limitations in its operationalization, there is consistent evidence of the convergent validity for this concept. However cultural complexity is operationalized, its disparate measures are highly intercorrelated. This suggests that there is a common theoretical construct underlying these measures, however difficult it may be to articulate succinctly.

5. Cultural Complexity And Dimensions Of Cultural Variation

In relating cultural complexity to the dimensions of cultural variation typically used by psychologists, it is important to remember that the concept originates in anthropology. Most of the societies and cultures used by Carneiro or Murdock and Provost to establish their measures of cultural complexity either cannot or are unlikely to be represented in the corpus of data associated with psychology. This is not to say that the concept of cultural complexity is not useful to psychologists, but it does sound a warning that there is a severe restriction in range among the peoples studied by psychology, including cross-cultural psychology. Established measures of complexity are not especially sensitive to differences at the high end of complexity, which is the range drawn on by most psychologists.

On the other end, it is unclear how less complex societies would score on the dimensions of variation in subjective culture cherished by psychologists. Would hunters and gatherers tend toward individualism or collectivism? Hunters and gatherers certainly relied on kin groups for survival, but these tended to be loose coalitions that could change with the availability of resources or with social conditions. Although interdependence was a basic condition of survival, there were fewer social norms governing behavior and less enforcement of these norms than in more complex societies. In 1994, Triandis argued that complexity is related to affluence and to the existence of multiple subgroups with different norms (hence promoting individualism), but another view is that it is difficult to establish a clear linear relationship.

Lomax and Berkowitz, using both the Ethnographic Atlas and cantometric measures of song, provided evidence that the relationship is curvilinear, with group cohesiveness, group organization, and division of labor being highest among cultures at middle levels of complexity. A similar argument could be applied to looseness–tightness. Data from an ecocultural approach found that only in the range from moderate (i.e., irrigated agriculture) to highly complex (i.e., industrial) societies is increased complexity associated with more looseness and less social conformity. In the range from hunter-gathers to the onset of agriculture, Berry found in 2001 that increased complexity, as operationalized by societal size, is actually associated with more social conformity (less looseness). At the high end, both the United States and Japan are incredibly complex but are currently used as instances of individualism, on the one hand, and collectivism, on the other.

There appears to be a more clear-cut relationship between cultural complexity and the second most frequently used dimension of cultural variation in psychology, that is, power distance. Put simply, cultural complexity affords power distance. By definition, the amount of differentiation of statuses, roles, affluence, and power with a society increases with its complexity. However, there is considerable latitude in how this differentiation is managed and perceived. For example, Americans aspire toward informality based on egalitarian ideals, whereas Japanese adopt more role-based formality in dealing with different statuses and roles. Although the real difference in incomes between people in upper and lower classes is greater in the United States, the psychological distance between the upper and lower parts of society is perceived to be lower among Americans than among Japanese. But over the broad range of human societies, given the tendency of individuals to exploit structural differences in power to their advantage, the perception of power distance should increase with increases in cultural complexity.

The measurement of cultural complexity is a reminder to psychologists that subjective culture is not the only viable definition of culture. The technological, material, organizational, and political–economic features of society taken by anthropologists to be indicators of cultural complexity may provide preconditions for the emergence of dimensions of variation in subjective culture found in cross-cultural psychology. From the other end, it may be extremely dangerous to assume that dimensions of cultural variation emerging from the analysis of samples from modern nation-states provide an adequate description of the full range of variability in subjective culture possible in human society.

6. Globalization And Cultural Complexity

The historical and archaeological record over the past 10,000 years can be read as a steady movement toward increasing levels of cultural complexity, with a massive acceleration during the past 200 years. Concurrent with increases in complexity has been a decrease in the number of independent polities in the world. There were more than 100,000 world polities circa 500 AD compared with the approximately 200 sovereign states represented in the United Nations today. With the onset of globalization, where information technology, high-speed travel, trade, and mass media have reduced geographic boundaries between societies, representing dimensions of cultural variation as dichotomies (e.g., individualism vs collectivism) is becoming increasingly problematic. It is now possible to speak of a global system and the cultural complexity of this system, with hybridity and contact zones between cultures being just as important as core values and practices within cultures.

In such a global system, it may be interesting to speculate about the ramifications of increased complexity. In the developing world, traditional cultures will continue to struggle with the onset of modernity. Collectivism and tightness in these cultures will give way before or hybridize with individualism and looseness. In the system as a whole, power distance will continue to increase, with immense concentrations of power and wealth being in the hands of global elites. In such an emerging system, words such as ‘‘individualism’’ and ‘‘looseness’’ might be inadequate to describe the values and roles of people at the top end of human society. The influence of economic elites—whatever their nationality—on the evolution of global cultural complexity will be immense and largely unprecedented in human history.

Of course, social scientists are aware that cultural evolution is not a one-way street. Cultural devolution, or the reduction of complexity, has also been documented and is usually caused by political or ecological catastrophes. This is not an unforeseen possibility for observers of the global system. Whereas the conceptualization and measurement of cultural complexity has been focused on simpler societies, future research might undertake to describe cultural evolution at the high end of complexity as social scientists seek to describe the interaction between a global supersystem and its constituent parts.

References:

Berry, J. W. (2001). Contextual studies of cognitive adaptation. In J. M. Collis, & S. Messick (Eds.), Intelligence and personality: Bridging the gap in theory and measurement (pp. 319–333). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Carneiro, R. L. (1970). Scale analysis, evolutionary sequences, and the rating of cultures. In R. Carroll, & R. Cohen (Eds.), A handbook of method in cultural anthropology (pp. 834–871). Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
Carneiro, R. L. (1987). The evolution of complexity in human societies and its mathematical expression. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 28, 111–128.
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Liu, J. H., & Allen, M. W. (1999). Evolution of political complexity in Maori Hawke’s Bay: Archaeological history and its challenge to intergroup theory in psychology. Group Dynamics, 3, 64–80.
Lomax, A., & Berkowitz, N. (1972). The evolutionary taxonomy of culture. Science, 177, 228–239.
Mann, M. (1986). The sources of social power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Murdock, G. P., & Provost, C. (1973). Measurement of cultural complexity. Ethnology, 12, 379–392.
Murdock, G. P., & White, D. R. (1969). Standard crosscultural sample. Ethnology, 8, 329–369.
Naroll, R., & Divale, W. T. (1976). Natural selection in cultural evolution: Warfare versus peaceful diffusion. American Ethnologist, 4, 97–128.
Triandis, H. (1994). Culture and social behavior. New York: McGraw–Hill.

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