Soc Personal Psychol Compass. 2017;11:e12334. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12334 w Abstract Causal influences of culture on cognition are challenging to examine scientifically. We here introduce a method to address this challenge. Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural i...

I offer a critique of the cultural cognition thesis. I argue that cultural cognition is not a theory about culture or cognition per se; rather, it is a thesis that aims to explain why specific American groups with opposing political views disagree over a select number of contemporary science issues. I highlight that cultural cognition can be characterized as a “strange loop” as it frequently de...

Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the develop...

Causality is a core concept of human cognition, but the extent to which cultural factors constrain, trigger, or shape the way in which humans think about causal relationships has barely been explored. This chapter summarizes empirical findings on the potential for cultural variability in the content of causal cognition, in the way this content is processed, and in the context in which all this ...

Studies on epistemically suspect beliefs (ESB) have suggested that individual’s analytic cognition suppresses unwarranted beliefs, however, our previous studies also showed that an inhibitory effect of analytic cognition was higher among Westerners than Easterners. Rather, intuitive cognition was a common predictor of beliefs between two cultures. Among several cultural differences in cognitive...

Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the “white-male effect,” this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This article proposes a new explanation: identityprotective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that individuals selectively credit and dismiss asser...

This paper discusses the role of cultural anthropology in Cognitive Science. Culture is described as a very large pool of information passed along from generation to generation, composed of learned "programs" for action and understanding. These cultural programs differ in important ways from computer programs. Cultural programs tend to be unspecified and inexplicit rather than clearly stated al...