Cultural materialists are concerned with the causality in socio-cultural systems and hold that, to find it out, we have to study material constraints that human existence is subjected to. They come from the need to produce food or shelter and to reproduce population. These can be renamed as infrastructure. In that cultural materialists prioritize material constraints to explain the socio-cultural systems, they agree with Marxists historical or dialectical materialism. However, cultural materialism does not take the notion that anthropology must become part of a political movement aimed at destroying capitalism.
Cultural materialism allows diverse political motivation.
Cultural materialism does not think all cultural changes result from dialectical contradictions but think that cultural evolution results from the gradual accumulation of useful traits through a process of trial and error. Harris was also influenced by Skinner s reductionism. Skinner, as a behavioral psychologist, wanted to explain everything, even art, religion, and language by simple mechanisms. He reduced the acknowledgedly complicated human personality as just stimulus-response. Harris worked in behaviorist psychology.