This article appeared recently in Frontiers in Cognitive Science. Interestingly, this came up in the feeds at a time when I am looking at the construction of perspectives and worldviews and how to assess these in a clinical situation.
These authors argue that perspective-taking, as an aspect of cognitive function, is more culturally constructed than the cognitive science lens tends to allow, for which they offer the anthropological lens as an additional tool.
For almost a century now, anthropology has been cultivating the ideal of perspective taking. The conditio sine qua non of being a good anthropologist is not to take one’s own culture as starting point.This is good advice for therapists, as well.
Reference:
Bender A, and Beller S (2011) The cultural constitution of cognition: taking the anthropological perspective. Front. Psychology 2:67. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00067
Read the whole article online or download the PDF.The cultural constitution of cognition: taking the anthropological perspective
- Department of Psychology, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany
To what extent is cognition affected by culture? And how might cognitive science profit from an intensified collaboration with anthropology in exploring this issue? In order to answer these questions, we will first give a brief description of different perspectives on cognition, one that prevails in most cognitive sciences – particularly in cognitive psychology – and one in anthropology. Three basic assumptions of cognitive science regarding the separability of content and process, the context-independence of processing, and the culture-independence of processing will then be discussed. We argue that these assumptions need to be questioned and scrutinized cross-culturally. A thorough examination of these issues would profit considerably from collaboration with anthropologists, not only by enabling deeper insight into the cultures under scrutiny, but also by synergistic effects that would allow for a more comprehensive understanding of human cognition.
Introduction
Perspective taking is a capability that we all learn as infants, at least in principle (e.g., Baillargeon et al., 2010), and yet even as adults, we still have our difficulties accomplishing it (Galinsky et al., 2006; Wu and Keysar, 2007): In our attempts to find orientation in the outside world, in social relations and interactions, or in our inner life, we often presume that we are adopting the only possible perspective, and hence find it difficult to view things from a different angle. In this regard, cognitive scientists barely differ from anybody else. For good reasons (in fact, better reasons than most other people) they assume to understand cognitive processes, and for similar good reasons, they believe to have achieved this insight by well-suited methods.
This picture changes somewhat, when turning to non-familiar cultures. When visiting a far-away country, most of us are hit by realizing that the people we meet show opinions, values, and behaviors that do not at all match our expectations. Suddenly, we have no difficulties imagining – and might even find it inevitable – that “the others” will perceive and most likely reason about the world differently from us. But how great are these differences really, and on which level do they arise? When we are in contact with “exotic” cultures, do we overestimate that, which we tend to underestimate in daily life? Or does what (and maybe even how) we perceive, think, and feel actually depend on the culture in which we grew up? In this regard, a substantial proportion of cognitive scientists seem to differ considerably from anybody else by assuming that cognition is largely independent from culture. Whereas anthropologists and ethnolinguists explore the specific cultural context and content of cognition, cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists prefer to work on what they assume to be universal aspects of cognition.
More importantly, these two groups tend to ignore each other’s perspectives of the subject they both work on. Research on human cognition has all too often ignored cultural diversity, and anthropology has all too often remained mute to discussions in cognitive science. As a consequence, research in cognitive science may fall prey t
o certain biases even in their approach to research questions and design (e.g., White, 2006). In this paper, we aim at elaborating the advantages of taking different perspectives, and we do so in at least two different senses: taking a cross-cultural perspective on cognition, and taking a cross-disciplinary perspective in cognitive research. Although we hope to contribute to a more general discussion in the cognitive sciences, we will basically focus on the value of anthropology for questions of cognitive psychology, as these are the two disciplines we are most familiar with1. We argue that combining these perspectives will give rise to synergistic effects and will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of human cognition – one that includes its cultural constitution.
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