Cognitive behavior is an indispensable factor in the history of human evolution; through cognitive behavior, human development has evolved from the Stone Age to the present high-tech information era. By simulating the process of cultural evolution, a cultural algorithm can reflect the evolutionary process of society accurately, which can speed up the process of solving problems. In this paper, cognitive behavior evolution and a cultural algorithm are combined to form the cultural cognitive evolution optimization (CCEO) algorithm. A cultural algorithm with the double-layer structure of the belief space and population space is transformed into a three-layer evolution mechanism in a CCEO so that the belief space improves on the next layer of careful guidance of the evolutionary process. Twenty-three benchmark test functions and two engineering problems were used to test the CCEO algorithm, and the results demonstrate that the culture cognitive evolution algorithm has a high convergence speed and calculation precision.