Despite its foundational role in the social sciences, “culture” remains a persistently ambiguous concept. This is a perennial obstacle to communicating the broader value of our work to the public and policy-makers, and particularly in clarifying its relevance to contemporary challenges. Building on our previous work, we propose a new framework defining culture as a system of adaptive information-processing. We re-frame culture not as a collection of beliefs or behaviors but as the structured organization of social information. We argue that culture consists of dynamic structural moments—norms as social information, normativity as allostatic convergence, and institutions as stabilizing homeostatic infrastructures. Integrating insights from statistical mechanics, information theory, and cultural evolution, we define culture as the unique configuration of moments across a population’s information landscape. This allows for both social change and cultural continuity by treating culture as a collective adaptation for the homeostatic convergence of lower-order allostatic information. Our model addresses the conceptual vagueness that has hindered empirical and theoretical progress across social sciences and heritage practice. In doing so, we offer a rigorous, scalable definition of culture as a multilevel, emergent, and adaptive system that can inform both sustainable policies and comparative research.
Cardinal et al. (Wed,) studied this question.