A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy

Abstract

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

Absolutism, Relativism, and Universalism in Personality Traits Across Cultures: The Case of the Big Five

“…In hindsight, over reliance on the Big Five is intertwined with a history of erroneously assuming that Western (often white, college educated) samples are normative, and that results can automatically be generalized to the rest of the world (e.g., Henrich et al, 2010;Thalmayer et al, 2021). The evidence from many lines of research is clear: Culture shapes psychology, and people in industrialized societies have been shown to be outliers, unrepresentative of the majority of humans in many regards (Henrich et al, 2010(Henrich et al, , 2022. By imposing Western etics in cross-cultural research, researchers miss important dimensions of variation, thus leading to an uneven and incomplete understanding of human psychology.…”

Philosophical Aspects of Emotion

“…In the paper, "A Cultural Species and Its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy" [140], Henrich et al introduce the emerging field of cultural evolution (also refer to Lewens [141]). It is a new interdisciplinary field of research that includes anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and philosophers, much like the field of cognitive science.…”

“…The field of cultural evolution, then, can be understood as a position that has been carved out in the debate over the existence of natural kinds/social constructions (or objective kinds/subjective kinds), including with respect to emotions or any other psychological phenomena. However, rather than postulating that the psychological kinds under inquiry are fundamentally natural kinds or social constructions, the field of cultural evolution presupposes that at least some psychological kinds have both evolutionary roots that are biologically traceable through our evolutionary history (e.g., in terms of genetic factors or evolutionarily evolved mechanisms), and exhibit a degree of plasticity (e.g., in terms of epigenetic factors or material factors) in such a way that requires an appeal to cultural explanations [148][149][150]. The basic idea here is that of the coevolution of biology and culture wherein, through the passage of time and natural selection, one influences the other.…”

“…Henrich and his colleagues refer to their approach in the field of cultural evolution as dual-inheritance theory, according to which human beings have "evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities" that ontogenetically adapt our minds, information-processing capacities, and emotions to a diverse, culturally-constructed world [151]. Furthermore, Henrich and McElreath note that dual-inheritance theorist also hold the following three principles as core principles of their framework: 1) Cultural capacities as adaptations: Culture, cultural learning and cultural evolution arise from genetically evolved psychological adaptations for acquiring ideas, beliefs, values, practices, mental models, and strategies from other individuals by observation and inference.…”

Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

“…While the human cultural evolution framework assumes salient stress variables, such as pathogens, broadly shape human cognition and behaviors (11)(12)(13), whether and how pathogens systematically affect basic cognitive processes has not been studied under an overarching theoretical framework of cognition.…”