Diversity as Asset

Abstract

We begin our commentary by summarizing the commonalities and differences in cognitive phenomena across cultures, as found by the seven papers of this topic. We then assess the commonalities and differences in how our various authors have approached the study of cognitive diversity, and speculate on the need for, and potential of, cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The Value of Diversity in Cognitive Science

“…Both have their roots in the overrepresentation of psychology, which clearly comes at the cost of diversity (in terms of the involvement of other disciplines) and arguably, though less clearly, at the cost of integration (in terms of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological identity across disciplines). The analysis presented here shows that this is less of an issue for topiCS, the society's second flagship journal, where we find less psychology, more diversity of topics and perspectives, and many instances of successful cross-and interdisciplinary collaborations (Bender, Beller, & Nersessian, 2015) than is claimed by N uñez and colleagues for the field at large.…”

“…Finally, disciplines also exert an influence by way of the ideas they propagate. When firmly establishing appealing ideas in new fields, the watermark of the discipline in which they originated may be so blurred that future generations become more and more oblivious of their provenance, perceiving the contribution as just one variant of cognitive science (Bender et al, , p. 685). Some of the arguably most productive ideas in cognitive science originated from anthropology, broadly conceived, or were inspired by an anthropological perspective: from theoretical concepts such as distributed and embodied cognition (Hutchins, ; Ingold, ), through methods like cross‐cultural studies (Murdock & White, ; Tylor, ), to entire research topics like cultural evolution (Boyd & Richerson, ; Gray et al, ).…”

“…Combining diverse approaches and the insights they yield allows us to target different components of cognition, to take different levels of analysis into account, and to broaden our perspective by considering different points of view. Besides illuminating a phenomenon, diversity in perspectives also increases affordances for “thinking outside the box,” hence creating the conditions for cross‐fertilization with new ideas, like quantum theory (Wang et al, ) or the complex systems approach (van Orden & Stephen, ) and even raising novel research questions that will advance the field (Barrett, Stich, & Laurence, ; Bender et al, ).…”

What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time

“…Since its emergence, cognitive science has been strongly committed to the assumption that cognition basically works in the same way across all human populations (Flanagan, 1991)a view still popular in wide parts of cognitive psychology. The insight that variability in cognition may indeed be greater than long assumed is slowly gaining ground (Bender et al, 2015;Bender, 2019). An accumulation of empirical findings (e.g., Levinson, 2003;Medin and Atran, 2004;Bender and Beller, 2016) and methodological criticism from within the cognitive sciences (Arnett, 2008;Henrich et al, 2010b) has helped to promote an attitude change.…”

Causal Cognition and Culture

“…Subscriber: Northwestern University; date: 14 June 2017 boundaries (Bender, Beller, & Nersessian, 2015;Bender, Hutchins, & Medin, 2010;Bloch, 2012; and see the debate in Bender, Beller, & Medin, 2012). For real scientific progress in this field, however, this is a challenge we need to rise to.…”