Looking Outside of Cog-Sci
Research outside of cognitive science tends to support findings in cognitive science, not contradict them.
Again from How Traditions Live and Die. I think it's worth quoting this summary, especially because it can be found in a book that will go on to argue against many of these ideas.
One word and one idea dominate theories of cultural transmission, at least since Tarde: imitation is the mother of culture. Imitation, one of Tarde's readers claimed, is "the key that unlocks every door," the fundamental mechanism that all culture springs from. This constitutes the imitation hypothesis.
For many authors, imitation is just a word that stands for cultural transmission . . . Others, however, have construed it as a particularly powerful form of transmission, one that can account for the birth of traditions. In this view, imitation (and imitation alone) solves the two problems of cultural diffusion: the Flop Problem (how to sustain a transmission chain by eliciting multiple transmissions) and the Wear-and-Tear Problem (how to deal with the copying errors that accumulate along a transmission chain). . . .
People around us offer an example that we are, somehow, compelled to reproduce. This neatly solves the Flop Problem. How, then, does imitation take care of the Wear-and-Tear Problem? By being faithful. Fidelity is often taken to be the key characteristic of human transmission, the one that explains the richness of our cultures.
More importantly, though, one often finds in education writing a sort of despair that cognitive science is the only research tradition we turn to. Why not sociology, social psychology, anthropology, developmental psychology? I suspect that at least part of this despair is based on the reality that recommendations from cognitive science tend to point in a direction that some educators don’t like—toward more explicit forms of instruction and away from more inquiry-based forms. It is hoped, perhaps, that research from different fields might point in a different direction.
That is certainly not what I am finding in my more extended reading—an example of which is captured by the summary above. These other research areas tend to support findings in cognitive science, not contradict them.
