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Cognitive foundations of cultural stability/diversity
« on: 2004-07-03 19:07:58 » |
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The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity
Science Direct
http://tinyurl.com/35nzu
Abstract
The existence and diversity of human cultures are made possible by our species-specific cognitive capacities. But how? Do cultures emerge and diverge as a result of the deployment, over generations and in different populations, of general abilities to learn, imitate and communicate? What role if any do domain-specific evolved cognitive abilities play in the emergence and evolution of cultures? These questions have been approached from different vantage points in different disciplines. Here we present a view that is currently developing out of the converging work of developmental psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists.
Article Outline
1. Modules and their domains
1.1. Mismatches between domains
2. The case of folk biology
3. The case of folk sociology
4. The case of supernaturalism
5. Conclusion
References
A cultural group is held together by a constant flow of information, most of which is about local transient circumstances and not transmitted much beyond them. Some information, being of more general relevance, is repeatedly transmitted in an explicit or implicit manner and can end up being shared by many or even most members of the group. ‘Culture’ refers to this widely distributed information, its representation in people's minds, and its expressions in their behaviors and interactions.
Anthropologists have been justly fascinated by the richness and variety of human cultures, which they have documented and tried to explain. To do so, they have relied on a view of the mind, if not literally as a ‘blank slate’ [1], at least as an unbounded and unbiased learning machine, equally open to any kind of cultural content. This ‘standard social science model’ [2] of the relation between mind and culture has been more and more forcefully challenged both from inside and outside anthropology. It is in particular incompatible with much recent work in developmental psychology according to which the child's acquisition of knowledge is guided by domain specific cognitive dispositions [3]. The challenge that current research attempts to address is that of reconciling the evident diversity of culture with our best hypotheses about cognitive development, and in so doing to help lay down new foundations for anthropological theory.
Not just the diversity but also the stability of culture begs explanation. Cultural representations and practices must remain stable enough across the community through which they propagate for people to recognize themselves as performing, for instance, the same ritual, endorsing the same belief, or eating the same food. To maintain their stability while reaching a cultural level of distribution, cultural information has to be remembered and transmitted again and again with very little alteration, or else the accumulation of such alterations would compromise the very existence of culture. Anthropologists [4], and now also ‘memeticists’ [5 and 6], have assumed that human capacities for memory, imitation and communication are reliable enough to secure faithful reproduction of the contents they process across group and generations.
Yet, as has been known since Bartlett, content transmitted through a chain of individuals undergoes rapid distortion and decay [7]. Recent approaches to memory and to communication emphasize that both involve reconstruction rather than copying of the material remembered or communicated [8 and 9]. As for imitation, although remarkably developed among humans, it is not very reliable either, and is limited to the reproduction of perceptible behaviors [10]. One cannot for instance perceive, and hence imitate, mental states such as linguistic competence or cultural beliefs. In spite of the limitations of imitation, communication and memory, there is (and has been since well before the invention of writing) an abundance of stable cultural contents. What mental mechanisms contribute to making this stability possible? Two different but mutually compatible and possibly complementary approaches should be mentioned here. Boyd, Richerson and their collaborators have modelled the stabilizing role of psychological biases in transmission favoring for instance prestige or conformity [11, 12 and 13]. Atran, Boyer, Hirschfeld, Sperber, and their collaborators have stressed the stabilizing role of the child's disposition to acquire knowledge structured in domain-specific ways [14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19]. Here, we report work related to this second approach.
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