rationalskepticism.org

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditional elements of future action.

Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour.

Culture consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organized, learned or created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodements and their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries, or formed by individuals themselves.

... culture is a derivative of individual experience, something learned or created by individuals themselves or passed on to them socially by contemporaries or ancestors... such a conception of culture differs from ones that have dominated thinking in much of the social sciences, especially in international relations and conflict resolution. For one thing, in this concept, culture is seen as something much less stable or homogenous than in the concepts proposed by others. Our idea of culture focuses less on patterning and more on social and cognitive processing than older ideas of culture do. For another, by linking culture to individuals and emphasizing the number and diversity of social and experiential settings that individuals encounter, we expand the scope of reference of culture to encompass not just quasi-or pseudo-kinship groups (tribe, ethnic group, and nation arethe usual ones) but also groupings that derive from profession, occupation, class, religion, or region. This reorientation supports the idea that individuals reflect or embody multiple cultures and that “culture” is always psychologically and socially distributed in a group. Compared with the older approach, which connected a singular, coherent, and integrated culture to unproblematically defined social groups, this approach makes the idea of culture more complicated. Such complication is necessary, because the world of social action, including conflict and its resolution, is a complex one, and we need a different concept to capture it.