What explains controversy over outpatient commitment laws (OCLs), which authorize courts to order persons with mental illness to accept outpatient treatment? We hypothesized that attitudes toward OCLs reflect "cultural cognition" (DiMaggio, P. Annl Rev Sociol 23:263-287, 1997), which motivates individuals to conform their beliefs about policy-relevant facts to their cultural values. In a study ...

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically a...

As something of an outsider to the study of “causal cognition,” I want briefly to query what it might be taken to mean in general—outside of any particular disciplinary understanding. Next, from that perspective I look at some empirical approaches to selecting problem-relevant senses of causality, and senses in which cognition might be seen as causal. I then turn, at more length, to the nature ...

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates de...