Cultural Hysteresis

Hysteresis refers to the persistence of an effect even after the initial cause of such an effect has been removed. This behavior is often observed in systems where the response to a changing input depends not only on the current state of the input but also on the system’s history.

In economics, this happens in the labor market, where high unemployment persists even after an economic downturn has ended. The longer individuals remain unemployed, the more their skills deteriorate, reducing their employability and prolonging the unemployment rate.

We observe many cases in human nature where reactions last longer than they should. I particularly find the case of Cultural Hysteresis interesting, where some tradition (the effect) remains present even after the circumstances that gave birth to it (the cause) have long gone away. One example is every ritual surrounding salt. Salt used to be very valuable, so we developed many rituals, traditions, or superstitions around it, and we continued with the rituals because our parents continued with them and their parents too, without giving it much thought.

You may recognize this image as the representation of an experiment by Stephenson, G. R. (1967) where monkeys were put in a room with a staircase in the middle that had bananas on top, but every time a monkey tried to reach for the bananas, the room was sprayed with water, so monkeys deterred from going for the banana and made it a norm so that when any monkey would try to get the banana the others had to stop them to avoid being sprayed. The interesting part is when they replaced an existing monkey with a new one. As expected, it tried to reach for the bananas, but before the spraying was triggered, it was stopped by the others. One by one, the scientists replaced every monkey until all of the original monkeys were removed from the room. And, even after all the monkeys were new and not one understood why they couldn’t reach for the bananas, they didn’t.

This is us, afraid of passing the salt hand to hand but not sure why (better not to take the risk). Of course, the salt is an example/metaphor, to which I ask the question: which ladders are you not climbing because tradition/consensus stops you with old fears?

For me, the main answer is working independently. I have some sort of passed-down fear because business development was probably much harder 20/50/100 years ago. But we live in the age of infinite leverage, so go out and do your thing.

Just as a side note, this does not imply we should get rid of all traditions but start from scratch with first principles, getting rid of all passed-down fear. Make sure you don’t break tradition into a recurring problem. The problem should be dead first.