Culture and the Individual

Cognition: What Is It?

Early Beliefs about Cognitive Abilities

Wundt & Boas – “primitive” peoples do not have the kinds of stimulation to develop cognitively and so do not

Levi Bruhl - Non-western thought is “prelogical”, less intellectual and has intrinsic emotional and motor elements that are not part of western inferential reasoning

Psychic Unity – the theory that all humans have the same intellectual and cultural potential

Western Ethnocentrism - Western thinking is “scientific thinking” and represents the ultimate in intelligent behavior. To think scientifically is to perceive the world as it really is.

Scientific thinking/formal logic is thought to be acquired in Western society late in childhood through formal schooling. Unschooled/pre or illiterate individuals will not show this kind of intelligence.

The “Great Divide” Theory

Evans Pritchard (1971): “much of the thought of primitive [sic] people is difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand.”

Claude Levi-Strauss (1962): called the “savage mind” a jack-of-all-trades, using concrete signs instead of abstract concepts.

Bain (1992): Aboriginal [Australian] society functions according to rules of interaction (authority and relationship based on kinship and friendship) rather than on western principles of transaction (professional roles and expertise, formal rules of impersonal relationships)

Many cross cultural studies try to break down generalized descriptions into operationalized aspects of cognition that can be tested for differences and similarities.

CognitionWidely defined as “thought processes” used to solve problems

using

Information processing

Categorization

Memory

Problems in the areas of

Inferential Reasoning,

Verbal Logical Reasoning,

Mathematical, and

Conceptual abilities

Inferential ReasoningInference = applying previously learned

elements to a new situation to come to a valid conclusion. Based on principles of logic.

Example of an experiment:

A box is divided into three parts, each with a door A, B & C

Participants are trained to:

get a marble by opening door A only and pushing a button A behind the door.

get a ball bearing by opening door C only and pushing button C behind the door.

Participants are then told that they can get a candy from the box and to do whatever necessary to get the candy.

Inferential ReasoningParticipants were

U.S. School children AND Kpelle non-literate Adults and Children (Traditional African tribal group)

Results:

Most U.S. Children over the age of 10 solved the problem.

15% of Kpelle adults solved the problem

30% of Kpelle children solved the problem

Kpelle children who were schooled spontaneously started working immediately on the box.

Unschooled Kpelle children and Kpelle adults had to be encouraged to start and showed fear of the box.

With prompting and encouragement, 60-80% solved the problem.

Conclusions:

The test materials were unfamiliar and therefore interfered with performance

Keys and matchboxes substituted for the puzzle box caused 70-80% to solve the problem and 90% to solve the problem with prompting/encouragement.

Kpelle can use inferential reasoning as well as Americans.

Inferential Reasoning

Verbal LogicVerbal puzzles are called syllogisms.

EG. All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Is Socrates mortal?

Luria 1976 studied two groups of Uzbek and Kirghiz villagers. One group was unschooled and unacculturated to collectivized farming. The other group was schooled and acculturated.

When syllogisms contained familiar content all did well.

When syllogisms contained unfamiliar content the unschooled did not solve them

EG. In the North, where there is snow all year, the bears are white;

Novaya Zemlya is in the far North;

What color are the bears there?

Example of an answer from an illiterate peasant is:

“How should I know what color the bear was. I haven’t been in the North. You should ask the people who have been there and seen them. We always speak only of what we see; we don’t talk about what we haven’t seen.”

Conclusions: Schooling – even a few months – allowed hypothetical reasoning about things outside the practical experience of the participants. Those without schooling used concrete reasoning.

Hypothetical vs Concrete ReasoningEquivalent studies done in

Nganassan (Eurasia)

Kpelle (Liberia, Africa)

Maya (Mexico)

Schooled individuals perform well; unschooled individuals perform at the level of chance even when the content of the syllogism is familiar.

Unschooled participants hear the syllogism information through a filter of personal knowledge and transform it as they hear it.

EG. If Sumo or Saki drink palm wine, the Town Chief gets vexed;

Sumo is not drinking palm wine;

Saki is drinking palm wine;

Is the town chief vexed?

One Kpelle participant’s answer:

“The town Chief was not vexed on that day. The reason is that he doesn’t love Sumo. Sumo’s drinking gives people a hard time, that is why the Town Chief gets vexed. But when Sake drinks palm wine, he does not give a hard time to people, he goes to lie down to sleep. At that rate people do not get vexed with him”

Categorization Categorization = grouping like items

together for efficiency of memory and processing

1. Color Categories

2. Emotion Categorization by Faces

3. Equivalence Sorting by Categories

CategorizationColor Categories

Berlin and Kay

Concepts of color categories labeled by color terms

Evolution of color terms

1. Dark vs. light

2. Dark vs. light & red

3. Dark vs. light, red & blue OR green

4. Dark vs. light, red, green & blue

5. Dark vs. light, red, green, blue & yellow

Examples. Stage 1 – Jale, New Guinea Highlands

Sing (black) vs. holo (white)

- Dani, New Guinea Highlands

Muli (dull) vs. Mola (brilliant)

CategorizationStage 1: New Guinea

Congo, Africa

South India

Stage 2: 17 cultures in Africa

Pomo Indians, North America

Australian Aborigines

Stage 3: 8 cultures in Africa

2 cultures in the Philippines

2 cultures in Australia

Homeric Greek

Stage 4: 5 Native American cultures

2 Native American cultures in Canada

1 culture in Indonesia

4 cultures in Africa

5 cultures in Mexico

1 culture in Colombia

CategorizationCore and Extension based on this presentation of color variation:

RESULTS

• Core is the best example of the color. This is very consistent across cultures.

• Extension is what colors are included within the color category. This varies greatly between cultures.

CategorizationFacial Expressions and Categories of Emotion

Ekman – sets of pictures of “pure” (Core) emotions expressed on faces (including prototypic expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust) were judged correctly by

Americans

Japanese

South Americans

Two New Guinea groups (Dani and Fore)

Cultural differences were found in Extension factors:

1. Organization of categories into superordinated categories

2. Category boundaries

3. Classification of blended emotions

4. The rules for when categories of emotion can be used

5. The number of terms that exist to label emotions

CategorizationClassification of objects in the cultural environment

Noun categories serve as prototypes standing for the “best example”

Examples:

Chair (different sizes, shapes, heights, colors, etc.)

Car (different models, sizes, shapes, colors, styles)

Ways of classifying objects

1. Perceptual criteria (color, form)

2. Functional criteria (things are found together or are used together in real life)

3. Taxonomic criteria (abstract qualities that are not obvious functionally or perceptually)

These three ways of classifying appear to be developmental in American kids (all of whom are schooled).

CategorizationExamples of cross-cultural studies of categorization/sorting

Uganda and Colombia: Sorting by taxonomy was a function of grade in school in school children.

Yupno of Papua New Guinea: Adults sorted by function; schooled children sorted by color; the older generation (especially men) sorted by abstract (non-perceptual) hot and cold qualities that are a function of general cultural knowledge acquired over time.

Nigeria vs. Glasgow, Scotland: Schooled Nigerian children outperformed Scottish school children in overall sophistication of sorting/categorization in a situation where the Nigerian children were more familiar with the test materials.

Conclusions:

Familiarity with the test materials and the testing context is essential to good performance

Schooling may lead to the tendency to search for characteristics that are less obvious

MemorySensory memory:

Information from senses that remains for only a few seconds unless you attend to it, moving it to short term memory

Short term memory (AKA working memory):

Memory that manages the information you are actually using at any given point in time

Kept in memory for about 30 seconds unless you focus on it, when it then is transferred into long term memory

Can only manage about 7 (+- 2) things at a time in short term memory

Long term memory:

Storing almost unlimited amounts of information over long periods of time

Retrieval depends on how the memories are encoded (categorized and connected)

MemoryDo non-literate people have better memories because they rely on oral

traditions and cannot store memories in written form?

Ghanaian and American University Students: Ghanaian students recalled stories told in English better than their American counterparts, even though English was their second language.

Kpelle individuals, both schooled and non schooled were able to recall lists of objects as well as Americans when they were allowed to use their own categories and clustering strategies.

Moroccan males (7-19): The recency effect (remembering the last because it is most recently viewed) was consistent across schooled and non-schooled participants. (Believed to be a hard-wired function of short term memory)

The primacy effect (remembering the first because of verbal rehearsal) developed with age only in schooled children. (Believed to be part of a strategy for remembering)

Conclusions: The structure of memory is universal, but strategies for remembering are culturally determined and vary.

Schooling teaches people to remember things in aggregates based on abstract principles that must be learned.