Humans differ across cultures. Already from an early age, children internalize the rules and regularities displayed by the people around them, creating cultural variation in perception, cognition, motivation or norms. Children from different cultures vary, for example, in their perception of visual illusions, their memory for spatial layouts and in their strategies of resource distribution. 

However, humans are not the only ape that displays cultural variation. Chimpanzee populations, for example, systematically vary in their behavioral preferences and social tolerance and even show group-specific variation in seemingly non-functional traditions. Nevertheless, despite such evidence for population-level variation in other animals, human’s vary in a wider repertoire of behaviors of which a larger proportion is socially acquired. Hence we might ask the question: what are the species-typical psychological mechanisms that create, structure and maintain uniquely human cultural variability. 

In this talk I will present evidence from a research program that combines cross-cultural, comparative and developmental studies to track variation and constancy across populations of humans and chimpanzees as well as to understand the developmental dynamics of a set of psychological mechanisms that, I will propose, promote uniquely human cultural diversity.