Cultural Evolution in Economics

Economics increasingly treats preferences, beliefs, and institutions not as primitives but as products of culture — socially transmitted information that evolves over time. We review the exchange between economics and the field of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution offers a formal framework that provides microfoundations for endogenous preferences, beliefs, and heuristics that economic models often take as given. These foundations help understand the emergence of social norms and institutions and their co-evolution with psychology, while explaining both cultural persistence and change. Economics contributes empirical strategies and a large body of evidence for identifying culture's causal footprint—natural experiments, discontinuity and epidemiological designs, and experimental methods in the field and laboratory. This line of research helps explain phenomena that standard models alone cannot: deviations from rational choice, belief systems such as religion and zero-sum thinking, why similar institutions perform differently across societies, and the cultural roots of innovation, growth, and the wealth of nations.