Culturism is a term with several overlapping meanings, but in its most established academic sense it refers to the practice of explaining social, political, and economic outcomes primarily through cultural factors rather than structural ones like institutions, class, or individual choice. Political scientists often use the related term “culturalism” to describe this explanatory framework, and the concept sits at the center of a long-running scholarly debate about how much weight culture actually deserves when we try to understand why societies differ. The word also surfaces in discussions about cultural preservation, cultural discrimination, and even physical fitness, making it a surprisingly slippery concept that repays a closer look.
What Culturism Actually Means in the Social Sciences
In political science and sociology, culturism (or culturalism) is the idea that culture itself is a major cause of political and social outcomes. The problem, as scholars have long acknowledged, is that there is no consensus on how to even define “culture,” let alone measure its effects. According to the International Encyclopedia of Political Science, culturalism “is problematic because of the lack of consensus on how to define culture,” and there is “little agreement on the added value of culturalism” as an explanatory tool. Whether culture is the primary driver of a political phenomenon or merely one variable among many remains an open and contested question.1SAGE Publications. International Encyclopedia of Political Science: Culturalism
Scholars have drawn a useful distinction between “thin” and “thick” versions of culturism. Thin culturism simply acknowledges that cultural variables contribute something to the explanation of a phenomenon. Thick culturism goes further and privileges cultural factors over political variables like social class, ideology, institutional constraints, and strategic decision-making.2SAGE Publications. International Encyclopedia of Political Science: Culturalism The thin version is relatively uncontroversial; few researchers deny that culture plays some role in shaping how people vote, work, or organize their communities. The thick version is where the arguments get heated, because claiming that culture trumps economics, institutions, or individual agency is a strong claim that demands strong evidence.
How Culture Gets Under the Skin
One reason culturism has staying power as an idea is that culture genuinely does shape how people perceive and process the world around them, sometimes in ways that register on brain scans. Research comparing East Asian Americans and European Americans found measurable differences in neural activity related to how people attend to context versus focal objects. European Americans showed greater brain responses to target events, while East Asian Americans showed greater responses to contextually unexpected events. The researchers found that these differences were mediated by how interdependent people considered themselves in relation to others, a core dimension of cultural identity.3PubMed. Culture and context: East Asian American and European American differences in P3 event-related potentials and self-construal
These are not trivial differences in survey responses. They are distinct patterns of neural activity associated with well-documented cultural tendencies. That does not mean culture is destiny, but it does mean cultural environments shape the brain’s habitual way of processing information, which in turn influences judgment, attention, and decision-making in ways people are often unaware of.
Gene-Culture Coevolution
The relationship between culture and biology runs even deeper than cognitive habits. Researchers studying gene-culture coevolution have found that human characteristics are the product of a long-running interaction between genes and culturally transmitted information. This process is responsible for distinctly human traits like other-regarding preferences, a taste for fairness, the capacity for empathy, and the importance people place on morality and character virtues.4PubMed Central. Gene-culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality
The basic idea is that culture evolves faster than genes and creates novel environments that then put new selective pressures on genes. Many human genes that show signs of recent or current natural selection appear to be changing in response to environments created by cultural innovations, from agriculture to cooking to social organization.5PubMed Central. Colloquium paper: gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics The classic textbook example is lactose tolerance: dairy farming cultures developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood because a cultural innovation (herding and milking animals) rewarded a genetic mutation that would otherwise have been irrelevant.
Dual-inheritance theory formalizes this by describing two interrelated selection processes: one operating on genetically inherited learning mechanisms and another on the cultural items transmitted through those mechanisms.6PubMed Central. Population thinking and natural selection in dual-inheritance theory In other words, humans did not just develop culture because of their biology; their biology has been continuously reshaped by the cultures they created. This gives culturism a firmer biological footing than critics sometimes assume, even as it complicates the idea that culture can be neatly separated from other causal forces.
Cultural Capital and Who Gets Ahead
One of the most tangible ways culturism plays out in everyday life is through the concept of cultural capital, an idea most associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The argument is that children from middle-class families gain an educational advantage not just because of money but because of the cultural knowledge, habits, and tastes they absorb at home. Research testing this idea in British schools found that cultural capital is indeed transmitted within the home and has a real effect on exam performance. However, the study also found that a large, direct effect of social class on educational achievement remained even after cultural capital was accounted for, meaning cultural reproduction provides only a partial explanation of class-based educational gaps.7Sociology. Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment
Later research using more rigorous methods that controlled for family background confirmed a similar picture. Cultural capital indicators did have mostly positive effects on children’s reading and math scores, but the effects were smaller than earlier studies had suggested. Interestingly, the impact varied depending on the family’s socioeconomic status. Indicators of familiarity with “highbrow” culture (museum visits, classical music exposure, reading habits) mattered more in high-status environments, while indicators of what researchers call “concerted cultivation,” like parents actively engaging in their children’s learning, mattered more in low-status environments.8Sociology of Education. Does Cultural Capital Really Affect Academic Achievement? New Evidence from Combined Sibling and Panel Data
This is a good example of the thin culturism finding holding up while the thick version falls short. Culture matters, but it does not override structural realities like income and class position. The two interact, and pretending otherwise misreads the evidence in either direction.
Culture, Trust, and the Welfare State
Culturist arguments also show up in debates about why some countries have generous social safety nets and others do not. A study examining the link between culture and welfare state generosity found that culture is a meaningful predictor: countries with loose family ties, individualistic attitudes, high levels of trust and tolerance, and low acceptance of unequally distributed power tend to have more generous welfare provision. These cultural channels explained roughly a fifth to half of the cross-country variation in welfare spending.9Journal of Comparative Economics. Culture, diversity, and the welfare state
The same study found something surprising about cultural diversity. Moderate levels of cultural heterogeneity actually reduced redistribution, consistent with the common argument that diverse societies struggle to maintain solidarity. But at higher levels of diversity, the negative effect was offset. The relationship was not a simple downward slope; it was more of a dip and recovery. This challenges both the culturist argument that homogeneity is necessary for a strong welfare state and the counterargument that diversity is irrelevant to it.
Rethinking the Protestant Work Ethic
Perhaps the most famous culturist argument in the social sciences is Max Weber’s thesis that Protestant Christianity fostered a distinctive work ethic that helped drive the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe. The idea has been hugely influential and is still routinely invoked in popular discussions about why some countries are wealthier than others. But recent research has poked significant holes in the theory.
A study investigating Weber’s thesis across a broad range of countries and time periods found that the “capitalist spirit” Weber attributed to Protestantism is not uniquely associated with Protestant populations at all. Instead, a preference for hard work appears among other religions and among non-religious people during periods of high economic growth, and it declines after the modernization phase of development is complete. The strongest predictor of an individual’s work ethic turned out to be the level and growth of economic development during that person’s childhood, not their religious background.10European Journal of Political Economy. Work ethic and economic development: An investigation into Weber’s thesis
This finding matters because it illustrates a recurring trap in culturist thinking: mistaking economic conditions for cultural ones. If people work hard during boom times regardless of their religion, then the “Protestant work ethic” may be less about Protestantism and more about what rapid economic growth does to people’s attitudes. Culture is still in the picture, since attitudes about work are cultural, but the causal arrow points from economics to culture rather than the other way around.
Tight and Loose Cultures
Another productive way researchers have studied culturism’s claims is through the lens of cultural tightness and looseness, meaning how strongly a society enforces social norms and how much it tolerates deviance. Cross-national research has found that tighter, more homogeneous, and less tolerant societies tend to be less innovative, while looser, more tolerant, and more diverse societies show higher levels of national innovation.11Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Cultural tightness–looseness and national innovativeness: impacts of tolerance and diversity of opinion
But the picture gets more complicated when you look within a single country. A large-scale study spanning more than 11,000 respondents across 31 Chinese provinces found that culturally tight provinces were indeed associated with greater governmental control and constraints in daily life. Yet in contrast to the global findings, tighter Chinese provinces were also associated with urbanization, economic growth, better health, greater tolerance toward LGBT individuals, and gender equality. Tight provinces produced fewer radical innovations but more incremental ones, and people in tighter provinces reported higher levels of happiness.12PubMed Central. Mapping cultural tightness and its links to innovation, urbanization, and happiness across 31 provinces in China
The takeaway is that cultural tightness is not inherently good or bad. Its effects depend on context, on what kind of norms are being enforced, on the stage of economic development, and on what outcome you care about. A culturist framework that treats “tight culture” or “loose culture” as a single package delivering predictable results everywhere will miss these crucial details.
Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Cultural Identity
Culturism inevitably collides with politics when societies have to decide how to handle cultural difference, especially in the context of immigration. Surveys across Western countries have revealed sharp geographic divides in attitudes. In Northern European countries like Austria, Germany, and Denmark, large majorities favor immigrants being absorbed into the host culture. In Mediterranean countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain, majorities lean toward multiculturalism. Strikingly, about 90 percent of the difference between Northern and Southern European attitudes could not be explained by demographic characteristics like age, education, or income; it was driven by differences in how people with similar profiles responded to the question itself, suggesting deeply embedded cultural orientations about what national belonging means.
The theoretical distinction between civic nationalism, built on shared values and civic participation, and ethnic nationalism, built on shared ancestry, language, or religion, is supposed to help sort out these tensions. In practice the boundaries are blurred. Civic nationalism often incorporates cultural expectations, such as speaking the national language or endorsing certain social norms, that look a lot like ethnic criteria repackaged in more acceptable terms. The distinction remains politically useful, but treating it as a clean binary overstates how neatly real attitudes break down.
Language as Cultural Infrastructure
Language is one of the most concrete battlegrounds where culturist ideas play out. Every language carries a distinct set of concepts, metaphors, and ways of organizing experience, so the loss of a language is genuinely the loss of a cultural perspective that cannot be fully recovered. Research on multilingualism and cultural diversity argues that explicit, comprehensive language policies are critically important for ensuring minority populations can access the national standard language while also maintaining the intergenerational transmission of minority languages, whether indigenous or immigrant.13International Social Science Journal. The importance of language policies and multilingualism for cultural diversity
This is where thin culturism turns practical. If you accept that cultural diversity has value, and the evidence on innovation and welfare states suggests it often does, then language preservation is not merely sentimental. It is a policy lever. Countries that let minority languages die without deliberate support are making a cultural choice, even if they frame it as a neutral outcome of market forces or individual preferences.
Physical Culture and the Other Meaning of Culturism
In Romance languages, the word “culturism” sometimes refers to something very different: bodybuilding and physical culture. This usage has a fascinating history that overlaps with the broader meaning of culturism in unexpected ways. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American physical culture entrepreneurs like Eugen Sandow and Bernarr Macfadden transformed ideas about health and success by merging commercial ambition with claims to scientific authority. They redefined bodily achievement through measurement, photography, and visible physical transformation, translating market ideals of progress and self-mastery into a physical form.14PubMed. Defining Success in American Fitness: Physical Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America
The connection to the broader meaning of culturism is not just an etymological coincidence. The physical culture movement was, at its core, an argument that the body could be shaped by cultural practices, willpower, and disciplined habits, much as culturism in the social sciences argues that societies are shaped by their cultural norms. Both versions of the term share an underlying assumption: that deliberate cultivation, whether of muscles or of social values, can produce measurable transformation.
Culture Beyond Humans
One of the more surprising developments in the study of culture is the growing evidence that humans are not the only species with cultural traditions. Animals as diverse as ants, sticklebacks, and killer whales are now known to acquire foraging skills, dietary preferences, mating preferences, and predator evasion tactics by observing more experienced members of their group.15Current Biology. Animal cultures Whale populations in the same ocean have been observed using completely different hunting techniques passed down through generations, suggesting that cultural transmission, not just genetic inheritance, shapes their behavior.
This finding complicates the strong version of culturism that treats culture as uniquely human and therefore uniquely powerful as a causal explanation. If other species also have culture, then culture is part of a broader biological toolkit for adapting to environments rather than a distinctly human force that sits above or apart from biology. It also raises conservation questions: when a whale population goes extinct, its cultural knowledge dies with it, much like an endangered human language.
Algorithmic Culture and Digital Fragmentation
The most recent frontier for culturist thinking involves the way digital platforms create and transmit culture. Social media platforms, particularly those driven by recommendation algorithms, have fundamentally altered how cultural information spreads. Research on TikTok’s algorithmic architecture describes a shift from social networks, where your connections determined what you saw, toward “social interest clusters,” where algorithms group people by inferred interests regardless of whether they know each other. This transformation carries what researchers describe as problematic implications: the depersonalization of online experience, growing opacity in how information is organized, and further subcultural fragmentation of an already divided digital public sphere.16New Media & Society. TikTok and the algorithmic transformation of social media publics: From social networks to social interest clusters
This matters for culturism because algorithms are now a major mechanism of cultural transmission. In the past, cultural norms spread through families, schools, religious institutions, and mass media, all of which involved some degree of geographic and social anchoring. Algorithmic recommendation systems bypass all of that. They can expose a teenager in rural Brazil and a teenager in suburban Japan to the same microculture simultaneously, while keeping both of them isolated from the broader cultural conversations happening around them. Whether this leads to richer cultural mixing or deeper fragmentation remains an open question, but it is clear that any serious culturist analysis now has to account for the fact that culture is increasingly transmitted by machines optimizing for engagement rather than by the traditional institutions that culturists have historically studied.