Culture and cognition

Culture and Cognition

Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supraindividual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information a d as schematic structures that organize that information. Cu...

Culture and Cognition 2

Many of the cognitive psychologists have assumed that human mind is universal, and have inferred that, even if they observe cultural differences, they are the consequences of different cultural stimuli. However, some social psychologists have demonstrated cultural differences in cognition (e.g., Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). They abandon the universality view and proposed an interac...

Culture and Cognition

Key Words, Culture and Cognition

How much does language influence how we think? How far are the categories of our language contingent and culture-specific? Few questions are of greater significance to the social sciences. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate that linguistic semantics can address these questions with rigour and precision, by analysing some examples of cultural 'key words' in several languages. We want to arg...

On Modeling Cognition and Culture

Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations.’ Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather ...