Introduction

Grounding and shared reality in dyadic context

Cultural transmission beyond dyad

Collective common ground, collective shared reality, and cultural dynamics

Emotion in cultural transmission and shared reality

Conclusion

References

Abstract

Micro cultural dynamics are concerned with the mechanisms of transmission, retention, and modification of cultural information in social networks. When interacting individuals mutually recognize that they share psychological reactions to given cultural information, it may be grounded as an aspect of their shared reality under specifiable conditions. The interpretation of cultural information as socially verified shared reality provides a basis for further dissemination of the information and coordinated social action. We review the recent literature that supports this general contention, while highlighting the role of emotion – a somewhat under-recognized aspect of shared reality research – and emphasizing the mediating role of cultural dynamics in the mutual constitution of social reality and shared reality.

Introduction

Culture is a set of available information that is transmitted non-genetically in a human population. The social transmission of cultural information between individuals in situ is central to cultural dynamics – the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. Interpersonal communication, as a type of cultural transmission, is critical for the establishment of shared reality. In this paper, we will spell out the ways in which shared reality is implicated in cultural transmission and therefore in cultural dynamics. Cultural transmission is composed of four subprocesses: production, grounding, interpretation, and memory. Individuals produce a communicable representation of cultural information, ground it to the common ground (i.e., add it to the information actually, and perceived to be, shared with their interaction partners), interpret the grounded information (i.e., transform it into a mental representation), and commit it to memory for future use [1]. Of these, grounding establishes mutuality. It occurs when the sender and receiver both recognize that their understanding of the communicated information is sufficiently similar to carry out their joint activity in the context [2, 3]. We argue that shared reality affects cultural transmission by changing the way in which grounded information is interpreted. Specifically, in the presence of shared reality, this information is tagged as socially verified “fact” (Figure 1). Importantly, socially verified information is more likely to spread through social networks (Figure 2). In this way, shared reality links cultural transmission to macro-level cultural diffusion. In this article, we will first review relevant literature to flesh out these propositions and supportive evidence, and then examine the role of emotion in this process.