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.

Conclusion

Shared reality processes provide a critical link in connecting micro-level cultural transmission to macro-level diffusion of cultural information, and therefore formation, maintenance, and transformation of the distribution of cultural information in a population. We suggest that shared reality acts as a cognitive tag, signifying that the transmitted and grounded cultural information has been socially verified as a “fact” and therefore is applicable in the future to others under other circumstances. Once established as shared reality, the cultural information can then be transmitted further beyond the particular context of cultural transmission to others in the population and thus diffuse through social networks. Recent work has pointed to the significance of emotion as a driver of cultural dynamics. Although the role of emotion in shared reality processes is not well understood, we suggest that it may be critical to investigate it in future research.