Makes sense. How else would humanity eventually come up with the question for the answer 42?

Too vague to be meaningful.

Possibly inherited memory or reactions

Collective consciousness is an archaic sociological concept which was touted by Emile Durkheim and he couched this in terms of what he called social facts. Collective representations and other notions influenced Carl Jung, though he cited Lucien Levy Bruhl instead. Durkheim tried to keep social construction independent ( sui generis ) of our biology, for which he’s characterized as a “blank slater” by the evolutionary psychology crowd (Pinker).

Jung thought cultural themes reflected a phylogenetic (or evolutionary) grounding in archetypes, but diffusion and convergence are difficult to rule out, and his reliance on esoteric and mystic ideas keep him from being taken seriously. Synchronicity? Really? He was stuck in the mindset often attributed to Lamarck, that striving and repetition imprint on our inheritance.

John Searle has taken a quite serious modern philosophical stab at “collective consciousness” based on social facts and how aspects of our reality (eg- the monetary system) are socially constructed yet there are bedrock brute facts that aren’t socially constructed.

Social construction tends to get a bad rap. It is similar to reflexivity where mere human thought and activity projected outward can take on a life of its own. George Soros has a monomanic version of this notion applied to financial markets and how far from equilibrium speculative bubbles form. We could be in one of those phases with the unsustainably heated up housing market once again.

So collective consciousness may be useful, as long as you steer clear of potential excesses, such as the noosphere and omega point pushed by mystics such as Teilhard, archetypes of Jung, and extreme social constructionism that ignores bedrock brute facts.

You describe what I usually think of as “culture” — a resilient (for good or ill) vehicle for worldviews, attitudes, unwritten social conventions plus all you mention, and more. Although I was born, brought up and educated in the United States, my family went there in the 1940s after having barely survived Naziism, and the differences to the Eastern European/Central Asian ancestral culture of home remain to this day, giving me alternative perspectives and emotions that are sometimes disconcerting, but often useful.

Meme organism as coined and defined by illogical atheist and BRILLIANT biologist Richard Dawkins.

It goes without saying that we absorb cultural aspects of existence that are unrelated to education or religion. the absorption varies from nation to nation. people have to manage the dichotomy between what they live and what they are told by parents, teachers or priests. an unstressful life depends on knowinf the difference and adjusting to it.