Cultural persistence is the persistence of "cultural traits" like customs, beliefs, and behaviours over time. In some cases, such traits last for very long periods, while in other cases, they change more rapidly and dramatically.^[1] Relevant traits could include democratic or authoritarian norms and behaviours, concern for human rights, concern for animal welfare, and norms conducive to scientific progress or free markets.

It could be valuable to know how persistent cultural traits tend to be, how often they are very persistent, how this varies between traits and conditions, and what interventions could affect persistence. This could inform predictions about what the future will be like and views about the importance of intervening to change various traits or various conditions that affect persistence. For example, generally, the more persistent we expect a positive change in people's moral views to be, the more valuable causing that change may be. Cultural persistence is therefore relevant to ideas such as trajectory change and value lock-in.^[2]

This question of cultural persistence has received some academic attention,^[1]^[3] and is also related to the field of cultural evolution.

Further reading

Sevilla, Jaime (2021) Persistence - A critical review, unpublished.

Related entries

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Giuliano, Paola & Nathan Nunn (2020) Understanding cultural persistence and change, The Review of Economic Studies, vol. 88, pp. 1541–1581.
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Beckstead, Nick (2015) The long-term significance of reducing global catastrophic risks, The GiveWell Blog, August 13 (updated 16 September 2015).
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Kelly, Morgan (2019) The standard errors of persistence, SSRN Electronic Journal.