In the book, The Secret of our Success, Joseph Henrich offers a perspective of cultural inheritance from evolutionary biology.
How do children determine who to pay attention to? who to learn from? 1. Skill / Competence ("whose arrows hit the target?") 2. Success ("who brings back the big prey?") 3. Prestige (cues of attention, deference) - use what other people are doing - they are worthy of paying attention to 4. Age (ie, scaffold to incrementally experience) 5. Self-similarity - what might be useful to you later? - males copy males, females copy females, etc