Definition
Culture is the set of shared, socially transmitted patterns of behavior, belief, and value that organize life within a group. It is the body of norms, practices, symbols, and assumptions that members of a community pass to one another and to the next generation through teaching, imitation, language, and ritual.
Sapolsky treats culture as one of the most powerful and most distal influences on any single act. By the time a person decides anything, culture has already shaped their childhood, their parents' parenting, the norms they internalized, and the brain that does the deciding. Culture is not a backdrop to behavior — it is woven into it.
Why it matters
How it works
Culture propagates through ordinary social learning. Children watch, imitate, and are corrected; they absorb a language that carries built-in categories and values; they are rewarded for conforming and sanctioned for deviating. Over time these patterns become automatic, felt as common sense rather than as choices.
Crucially, culture is dynamic. Each generation reproduces the patterns it received but also varies them, so culture both constrains the individual and is continuously remade by individuals. It interacts with ecology, history, and biology rather than standing apart from them.