What Can Cognitive Science Do for People?

Abstract

The critical question for cognitive scientists is what does cognitive science do, if anything, for people? Cognitive science is primarily concerned with human cognition but has fallen short in continuously and critically assessing the who in human cognition. This complacency in a world where white supremacist and patriarchal structures leave cognitive science in the unfortunate position of potentially supporting those structures. We take it that many cognitive scientists operate on the assumption that the study of human cognition is both interesting and important. We want to invoke that importance to note that cognitive scientists must continue to work to show how the field is useful to all of humanity and reflects a humanity that is not white by default. We wonder how much the field has done, and can do, to show that it is useful not only in the sense that we might make connections with researchers in other fields, win grants and write papers, even of the highest quality, but useful in some material way to the billions of non‐cognitive scientists across the globe.

Building a Cognitive Science of Human Variation: Individual Differences in Spatial Navigation

“…Even research on language and language acquisition, an area that has usually deemphasized individual differences, has started to take a serious look at how people vary (Kidd, Donnelly, & Christiansen, 2018). In the past few years, the move to study a much wider variety of the world's peoples has accelerated the examination of the assumption of universality (Prather et al, 2022).…”

Cognitive scripts and narrative identity are shaped by structures of power

“…The focus on universals without adequate assessment, and on accuracy without attending to values, has created a science relatively devoid of an understanding of how socially stratified power hierarchies are maintained through cognitive processes, and how cognitive processes might also be a source for changing such systems of inequity [10]. Others are making such calls [11], and there have been people making such calls for some time. Although not centered on power, Neisser 14 [67] worried about how narrow research on memory was, with an emphasis on the search for universals using narrow and limited methods.…”

“…Current global attention to concerns with systemic inequity and oppression creates an opportunity to shift our science towards one that is both more equitable and more complete. Such calls to action have been made to psychological science broadly [8,9], and cognitive psychology specifically [10,11]. To meet these calls, we argue for a shift in how cognitive psychology conceptualizes and measures "context.…”

“…The predominant situational approach to context has been paired with an assumed and relatively untested universal generalizability of cognitive processes [11,12,13]. For example, in a recent analysis, virtually none of the examined cognitive psychology papers highlighted race [12].…”

“…Further, some of this inattention may derive from issues around "well-cataloged histories of supporting racism, race science, colonialism, and eugenics" [11,16,17,18], which result in legitimate concerns about how to engage with and test universalist assumptions. As we show, considering power via a structuralpsychological approach is valuable for a more comprehensive understanding of narrative identity -one that neither presumes universalism nor ignores the power dynamics relevant to how and why cognitive processes may differ among groups.…”