The Challenges to the Study of Cultural Variation in Cognition

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012

Humans are unique among animals for both the diverse complexity of our cognition and our reliance on culture, the socially-transmitted representations and practices that shape experience and behavior. Adopting an evolutionary psychological approach, in this essay we consider four different facets of the relationship between cognition and culture. We begin with a discussion of two well-established research traditions, the investigation of features of mind that are universal despite cultural diversity, and the examination of features of mind that vary across cultures. We then turn to two topics that have only recently begun to receive attention, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of cultural information, and the effects of features of cognition on culture.

Three prominent research programs in cognitive psychology would benefit from a stronger engagement with the cultural context of cognition: studies of poverty focused on scarcity and cognitive bandwidth (CB); of the dual-process model of moral judgment (DPM); and of biases using the implicit association test (IAT). We address the blind spots common to these programs and suggest research strategies for moving beyond an exclusive focus on cognition. Research on poverty using the CB approach would benefit from considering the cultural schemas that influence how people perceive and prioritize needs. DPM researchers could explain variation by analysing cultural repertoires that structure moral choices. Research using the IAT can better explain implicit attitudes by addressing the variability in cultural schemas that undergird biases. We identify how these research programs can deepen the causal understanding of human attitudes and behaviours by addressing the interaction between internal cognition and supra-individual cultural repertoires.

SIASAT, 2020

Communication is the exchanging of information through speaking, writing and signals. It plays an important to our development; it is the dissemination of ideas, and information to persons. Cognition is our mental process in which we acquire knowledge and understanding, and this is done through our thoughts, our experiences, and our senses. Cultural differences involve what people’ believe how they behave, the language they speak, and their practices based on their ethnicity. Cross-cultural differences in cognition can be very effective to certain operations conducted by persons; however, it can also limit us based on our perspective. To gather information and to understand how culture affects cognition and the way we think, questionnaires, surveys and experiments were used. Questionnaires were administered to tertiary level students, surveys were administered to teachers and experiments were conducted among students from various culture and background. The experiments were centered on visualization, focus and critical thinking. The purpose of this study is to investigate if cultural differences affect the way we think, and this double-dissociation is discussed in terms of implications for different developmental trajectories, with different developmental sub-tasks in the different cultures.

International Journal of Psychology, 2011

T he importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg's model of moral development which relies heavily on people's justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision-making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand crosscultural variability in moral values and the processes that underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Although the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.

The importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception to this generalization. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg’s model of moral development which relies heavily on people’s justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand cross-cultural variability in moral values and the processes which underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Though the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that still remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2022

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as 'butterfly collecting'. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of 'othering' that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants.

Nature Human Behaviour, 2017

Three prominent research programs in cognitive psychology would benefit from a stronger engagement with the cultural context of cognition: studies of poverty focused on scarcity and cognitive bandwidth (CB); of the dual-process model of moral judgment (DPM); and of biases using the implicit association test (IAT). We address the blind spots common to these programs and suggest research strategies for moving beyond an exclusive focus on cognition. Research on poverty using the CB approach would benefit from considering the cultural schemas that influence how people perceive and prioritize needs. DPM researchers could explain variation by analysing cultural repertoires that structure moral choices. Research using the IAT can better explain implicit attitudes by addressing the variability in cultural schemas that undergird biases. We identify how these research programs can deepen the causal understanding of human attitudes and behaviours by addressing the interaction between internal cognition and supra-individual cultural repertoires.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2023

The idea that cognition might vary across cultural and linguistic groups is of course not new (see, e.g., Cole 1996). Famously, the linguists Edward Sapir, a student of Boas, and Benjamin Whorf, a student of Sapir, hypothesized that the syntactic structure of a language shapes speakers' thoughts (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1956), a hypothesis now known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis." As Whorf put it (1956, 212): The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face. On the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized in our minds. This means, largely, by the linguistic system in our minds. It is notoriously unclear, and it has been long debated, what exactly Sapir and Whorf were asserting (e.g., Kay and Kempton 1984), but despite its vagueness it has inspired, and still inspires research in cognitive science (e.g.

In a provocative and important recent article Anthony Marsella (1998) makes an eloquent plea for the forging of a new metadiscipline of psychology that he labels global-community psychology. Marsella argues that we need a radical rethinking of the fundamental premises of psychology, rooted as they are in Western cultural traditions. Features of an emergent global-community psychology include an emphasis on multicultural and multidisciplinary approaches to human behavior that draw attention to the importance of context and meaning in human lives. Marsella's call for a global-community psychology reflects, in part, a growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of cultural factors in a diversity of psychological domains such as cognition, emotion, social behavior, and psychopathology.

Annual Review of Sociology, 2021

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences-cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy-significantly reshaping sociologists' approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece-research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.