After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of evidence recommends caution in relying on one's intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront.How much does culture shape people's brains and cognition? Does culture shape 'core' or 'basic' aspects of our attention, perception, thought, memory, reasoning, motivations, mentalizing abilities, decision heuristics/biases or moral intuitions? Does culture influence our epistemological inclinations such as what constitutes a good argument or solid evidence? Given that over 90% of all research in

No abstract

No abstract

Fifty years of cross-cultural researchers critiquing classical cognitive science’s omission of cultural variation suggests an unresolved tension deeper than this surface conflict. We propose that the intransigence of classical cognitive science can be explained by the action of a tacit Newtonian principle (NP) that the proper subjects of cognitive science are universal properties of the mind. If we jettison the NP, it is not clear how we can rule out that cognitive science should apply to a myriad of ungeneralizable case studies (e.g. studying the idiosyncrasies of some individual or group). In fact, this collapse into hermeneutics has occurred in some branches of cognitive research within living memory. The status of the NP as both problematic and necessary explains why the culturalist critiques calling for the dismantling of the NP consistently gone unheard: Calls to cut away a rotten beam may well fall on deaf ears if the beam is all that holds up the roof. In order to break out of this cycle, we propose an alternative to the NP, combining cultural evolutionary theory with a newly-developed principle of articulation. We go on to show how this alternative framework provides a more productive and accurate approach to incorporating both universal and culturally-specific cognitive features as evidenced by ethnographic, biological and cognitive data as well as motivating a range of new directions of research.