Bringing history back to culture: on the missing diachronic component in the research on culture and cognition

A growing body of evidence shows that cognitive processes in general, and causal cognition in particular, are variable across cultures (Choi et al., 1999; Norenzayan and Heine, 2005; Henrich et al., 2010). The majority of these findings are based on cross-cultural comparisons contrasting well-defined groups, with little explicit consideration of temporal change within those groups. While this strategy has undoubtedly proven successful, an important limitation is that it can implicitly lead to a view of cultures as stable entities and associated cognitive processes as essentialized. A prosaic illustration serves to introduce this idea. Suppose we hypothesize that smoking cigarettes and culture are closely related. We measure the number of cigarettes per capita and find that Chinese smoke more than Americans (Ng et al., 2014). If we collect time-series data, however, we might notice that had our measurements been taken in 2000, we would have found no cultural difference. Further, if our time-series had gone even further back to measurements taken in the 1980s, we would have found just the opposite pattern, such that Americans smoked more than the Chinese. Clearly, findings for cultural differences are of limited utility when they do not account for within-culture historical trends. Furthermore, theoretical explanations for cultural difference risk reifying an incomplete perspective if they take such results as indicative of some atemporal notion of “culture” itself. In this paper we argue for the need to developmethods of within-culture diachronic analysis as a necessary step for understanding the complex links between culture and cognition. We specifically focus on the link between culture and causal cognition, yet the argument is applicable to the field as a whole.