The Cultural Transmission of Tacit Knowledge

Abstract

A wide variety of cultural practices take the form of "tacit" knowledge, where the rules and principles are neither obvious to an observer nor known explicitly by the practitioners. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot simply imitate experts, and experts cannot simply say or demonstrate what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? We present a domain-general model of "tacit teaching", that shows how high-fidelity transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies in cases where the underlying features of the practice are subject to interacting and competing constraints, as is expected both in embodied and in social practices. Our model makes predictions for key features of the teaching process. It predicts a tell-tale distribution of teaching outcomes: some students will be nearly perfect performers while others receiving the same instruction will be disastrously bad. This differs from most mainstream cultural evolution models centered on high-fidelity transmission with minimal copying errors, which lead to a much narrower distribution where students are mostly equally mediocre. The model also predicts generic features of the cultural evolution of tacit knowledge. The evolution of tacit knowledge is expected to be bursty, with long periods of stability interspersed with brief periods of dramatic change, and where tacit knowledge, once lost, becomes essentially impossible to recover.